People have relationships all the time.
Main Cast: Matthew Goode, Chloe Pirrie
Developed By: Scott Frank, Chandni Lakhani
Based On: Department Q Novels by Jussi Adler-Olsen
Sometimes I read the description of a series and know it is right in my wheelhouse. This is both good and bad. I know my own taste, of course, but it also leads to sometimes unreasonably high expectations. This is precisely where Dept. Q found itself. That it stars Matthew Goode from the delightfully campy A Discovery of Witches just raised the stakes even more.
I’m thrilled to report that Dept. Q not only lived up to those expectations but exceeded them. I loved every episode.
Goode plays Detective Chief Inspector Carl Morck. Morck is made the head of a new Scottish department focusing on cold cases after a routine case turned wildly traumatic. Nobody expects anything to come of this unit of one scarred man, set up in a damp basement.
But Carl Morck is nobody’s fool. He finds himself a small band of compatriots and sets to solving the disappearance, four years earlier, of a crown prosecutor. Let the games begin.
A successful crime drama/mystery series must have two strong elements: a strong plot and good chemistry between the main players. Dept. Q has both. The disappearance and investigation are twisty and very interesting, played out in both the present and the past. The showrunners played with fire a little bit, letting the audience know parts of the solution before the detectives figured it out, but it works beautifully.
The character dynamic centers on four main players: Morck, his former partner James Hardy (Jamie Sives), his overqualified new assistant Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov), and his coworker Detective Constable Rose Dickson (Leah Byrne). They are a motley band of outsiders led by a man not inclined to follow the rules. They are delightful.
Each member of the team has distinct skills and considerable baggage. Morck is not a fun person, but he is both brilliant and respected by his crew despite lacking any sort of interpersonal skills. The other members of the force play much smaller roles, mostly existing to look down on the members of Dept. Q.
I generally prefer British or Australian crime dramas over their American counterparts. There is plenty of violence in Dept. Q, but it has consequences (both physical and psychological) and is primarily a tool of the bad guys. It’s a more introspective type of police procedural that I find vastly superior to those where every investigation ends in a barrage of police bullets.
The one complaint I have about this series is that there aren’t 50 more episodes available right now. As of this writing (end of June, 2025) Dept. Q has not been renewed by Netflix for a second season. I very much hope to see more of DCI Morck and his ragtag team. This first season leaves a lot of room for both character development and sharp, well-written mysteries.
More TV Series Reviews
Sue reads a lot, writes a lot, edits a lot, and loves a good craft. She was deemed “too picky” to proofread her children’s school papers and wears this as a badge of honor. She is also proud of her aggressively average knitting skills She is the Editorial Director at Silver Beacon Marketing and an aspiring Crazy Cat Lady.
Leave a Reply