Dept Q review: this Netflix series about dysfunctional cops is irresistible

A dead police officer, a missing prosecutor and a touch of humour put this Scottish cold case drama at the top of the binge list.

Leah Byrne in Dept. Q (2025)

I’ve just caught up with Netflix’s Dept. Q, which in a short couple of weeks has irresistibly climbed to the top of the streamer’s global list and is almost inescapable on social media.

In its first week, the bleak but thoroughly entertaining thriller performed around the globe, having featured in 72 countries in the top 10. Expertly engineered, it’s about the creation of a new police section, a cold case division led by several dysfunctional cops, beleaguered misfits fronting a flying squad for hopeless cases.

The unit is led by the miserably forthright Carl Morck, played with wonderful insolence by the usually unflappable and often aristocratic Matthew Goode, best known for Brideshead Revisited and Downton Abbey. Sporting a heavy black beard, the actor takes great pleasure in Morck’s sarcasm, and his dyspeptic irritation that no one in his orbit can perform to his demanding standards.

He’s wracked with guilt following an attack that left his partner James Hardy (Jamie Sives) paralysed – Morck carrying physical and emotional scars from being shot himself – and another police officer dead.

His colleagues include Alexej Manvelov’s stoic Syrian detective Akram Salim, who provides much leavening deadpan humour to the occasionally labyrinthine plot, and Leah Byrne’s seemingly scatty DC Rose Dickson, who despite a comically frizzed-up hair do is no pushover. She’s determined to prove herself after being taken off active duty while suffering PTSD.

And Morck is required to check in with Dr Rachel Irving (the reliable Kelly Macdonald), a police therapist who’s helping him sort out his chaotic life after the shooting. The always totally watchable Mark Bonnar is the Lord Advocate, the chief public prosecutor for Scotland, and, as always, seems to be mixed up in all sorts of murky shenanigans.

Matthew Goode in Dept. Q

The series is co-created by Scott Frank, a two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter who worked on Logan, Minority Report and, more recently, Netflix shows such as The Queen’s Gambit. His collaborator and co-writer is the emerging Chandni Lakhani, a one-time script writer on the Emmy-winning Netflix series Black Mirror, who also worked on Dublin Murders, based on the acclaimed Tana French novels, and the record-breaking BBC thriller Vigil.

They based their series on the books of Danish best-selling crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen, unflinching novels characterised by trenchant social criticism, sardonic dialogue, and a sly, droll humour. His international reputation rivals that of Nordic Noir thriller writers such as Jo Nesbo, Lars Kepler and Arne Dahl, though he disdains the moniker of “King of Danish crime fiction”. As the eminent critic Barry Forshaw wrote, “His edgy novels deal with corrupt individuals, social outsiders, manipulative psychopaths, and all of this strips away the fairy-tale varnish that has been Denmark’s prerequisite since the nineteenth century.” So popular are his books in his home country, they’ve been made into six Danish movies, though he made his reluctance with film adaptations clear in an interview with Forshaw, adamant that a novel of 500 pages could not be adapted into a two-hour feature. He said at the time that he would feel safer with the season-based formatting of a television series.

His wishes are fulfilled in this highly popular show, Frank and Lakhani having fashioned a densely worked adaptation of the commencing novel in the series, The Keeper of Lost Causes. Published in 2007, the book signals Adler-Olsen’s first attempt to write a crime story as a part of a much bigger narrative that he planned to complete in a time span of 17 years. “I wanted each individual book to be a stand-alone, but if you choose to read the entire series, you will also end up with an overall story together with the background stories of our friends Carl, Rose and Assad,” the novelist says.

But it was no easy task bringing the novel to the small screen, Frank living with Adler-Olsen’s books in his creator’s mind for more than two decades. “There was just something about it,” he tells Netflix’s Tedum website. “The title, this notion of something called Department Q, stayed with me. And so I met with the author while I was shooting A Walk Among the Tombstones in New York, and I’d actually had the books for a couple of years by then.”

At that point he had little idea of when he’d be able to work on Dept. Q, but Adler-Olsen was happy to wait. “He said, ‘I trust you’ and that he’d always hoped I would end up writing and directing it.” Now, Adler-Olsen has gotten his wish: Frank wrote or co-wrote all nine episodes of Dept. Q and directed six.

But getting the production up wasn’t easy. “It wasn’t for lack of trying,” Scott says in a BBC interview. “We did try an American version which we were going to set in Boston, but it just didn’t feel right.”

Frank was eventually sold on Edinburgh after six years of intense contemplation, the Scottish city offering varied locations, crew base, and studio space. The director was apparently sold as soon as he stepped off a bus on the city’s Royal Mile, running through the heart of Edinburgh’s Old Town. The Mile is overlooked by impressive, towering tenements, between which cobbled closes and narrow stairways interlock to create a secret underground world.

The gothic world of Adler-Olsen’s stories found a perfect synchronicity in the city that has mordantly celebrated its gothic atmosphere, history, hidden spaces and the psychological impact of fear and isolation.

“You’ve got all this grotesque grim stuff that happened, acts of cannibalism, body snatchers, serial killers, very dark stuff happening in history, and what I’m saying is Edinburgh hasn’t changed that much,” the great Edinburgh crime novelist Ian Rankin told the ABC’s Barbara Miller about his city. “It pretends it has but it really hasn’t. It’s still a city where you can imagine any amount of terrible things happening behind the thick Georgian stone walls and the twitching net curtains.”

It all begins with a violent episode that has a lasting psychological effect on Morck. A young policeman on a routine welfare check finds a man stabbed to death. He calls for assistance and Morck and Hardy arrive only to be shot by a man in black wearing a balaclava.

The young cop is shot dead but Morck and his partner, though badly wounded, are left alive. Morck, spared by a few capricious inches, is left with a burning impression of the killer’s eyes. Four months pass, and Morck returns to work at police headquarters, no longer the famous egocentric crime solver but gloomy and disinterested, and plagued by a profound indifference.

His boss, Kate Dickie’s severe, sarcastic and opportunistic Detective Chief Superintendent Moira Jacobson, assigns him to a new Cold Case unit housed in the department’s grim, airless basement. When Morck requests staff, he’s sent Akram Salim, a civilian who mostly worked IT, and as it quickly turns out has a mysterious background in Syria where he might have been a cop or something in the military.

Then the unlikely Rose inveigles herself into the fledgling department as they commence work on the case of Merritt Lingard, a ruthless prosecutor missing for four years, played with great courage by Chloe Pirrie, who suffers all kinds of physical privations as the narrative unfolds.

Her story runs in parallel with the investigation into Morck’s shooting, sometimes claustrophobically it must be said, the gothic nature of the two interlocking story arcs leavened by some surprising humour built around the interplay between the detectives.

This is a welcome nod to Adler-Olsen’s novel too, providing some breathing space in two trying cases, as well as an evolving bridge between the main characters.

As the writer says, “It is said that the shortest distance between two people is a smile, but I think it is laughter. And with laughter you get the reader’s attention and goodwill, even in difficult matters. I like to think that it can bring any nationality closer together.” Even those gloomy Scots.

Dept. Q streaming on Netflix.