“Dept. Q,” this week’s new cop show on Netflix, is a study in internationalism. Largely written and directed by an American, Scott Frank, it is based on a novel by the Danish crime writer Jussi Adler-Olsen and set and filmed in Scotland with a British cast led by Matthew Goode.
That might stand out given the current trans-Atlantic vibe, but of course the show, which premieres Thursday, has been in the works for years. And if anyone is going to remain committed to peaceful relationships across multiple markets, it will be Netflix.
The ambitious, nine-episode season also reflects the history of Frank, a talented writer and director who has had his highs (“Out of Sight,” “The Queen’s Gambit”) and his lows (“Monsieur Spade”). He likes to roam among genres, with a home base in literary American crime (“Out of Sight,” “Hoke,” “A Walk Among the Tombstones”) but forays into the western (“Godless”), science fiction (“Minority Report”), period melodrama (“The Queen’s Gambit”) and others.
For “Dept. Q,” in which Goode plays a damaged Edinburgh detective tasked with assembling a new cold-case unit, Frank (who developed the show with the British writer Chandni Lakhani) gets to play mix-and-match in one place. The influence of Nordic noir on the traditional British mystery has been established for several decades now, but Frank adds some American flavor to the cocktail.
The buddy-cop pairing of Goode’s Carl Morck and Alexej Manvelov’s Akram Salim, a Syrian immigrant with an unsettling knack for extracting confessions, is probably more richly drawn than it would be otherwise; the interplay of Goode and Manvelov is one of the show’s main pleasures. And as is usually the case in Frank’s productions, “Dept. Q” has an overall flow and fluency — a style that is, if not always seductive, consistently engaging.
(A 2013 Danish film based on the same source, “The Keeper of Lost Causes,” is dour by comparison, though some might find its 96-minute running time preferable to the seven and a half hours of the series.)
On the other hand, a British or Danish series would not be as talky as this “Dept. Q,” which has been thoroughly banterized. Pithy or not-so-pithy exchanges — between Morck and Salim; Morck and his therapist (Kelly Macdonald, acerbically charming as always); Morck and his paralyzed former partner (the effortlessly soulful Jamie Sives); Morck and a young constable he grudgingly adds to his team (Leah Byrne) — outweigh action and crowd out detection. (The sparse moments when character is revealed through activity, particularly Salim’s ambivalence about his own harsh methods, are water in a desert of exposition.)
This would not be a big problem if the dialogue had more snap, but perhaps the shift in location, with its associated shifts in language and culture, was a problem for Frank, because much of the back-and-forth is forced and flat. The stellar cast works valiantly, but aside from Macdonald and Sives, they can’t consistently humanize or humorize it.
Influences run in both directions, of course, and whatever Frank brings to “Dept. Q,” the show’s roots in Nordic noir are its dominant feature. The parlor sadism that marks the genre — over-the-top monstrosity normalized by the chilly restraint with which it is presented — is on display in the baroque manner in which a captive is held hostage, a primary visual motif of the season-long case. The convolutions of the case and the extreme leaps of plot and psychological association that lead to its solution — which will be an early deal breaker for some viewers — are a joint Nordic- and British-mystery inheritance.
And the show’s structural glue — calling it a theme would be overstating the case — is trauma, with a secondary coat of guilt. Morck is carrying the weight of a catastrophic incident on the job, depicted in a genuinely shocking opening scene; his therapy sessions are mandated. One team member joins meetings by video from his hospital bed. Another had a breakdown after a civilian was accidentally killed. Salim, who may or may not have been a professional torturer, is well adjusted by comparison.
All of this weighs on Goode, whose customary sleek handsomeness and sexual magnetism are dispensed with here. Morck is oblivious to social graces and, we are constantly told, an irredeemable jerk. This is disconcerting to the viewer, because even behind messy hair and a scruffy beard, and with his expressiveness and charisma on a leash, Goode is either incapable of being, or unwilling to be, genuinely hateful.
Morck has a heart of gold underneath, of course. But the show makes us wait the full nine episodes for some sentimental release, and the effect is that Goode’s performance, while proficient, feels a little dull. He’s fine, but “Dept. Q” might have been more interesting with someone genuinely scruffier in the role.
Mike Hale is a television critic for The Times. He also writes about online video, film and media.
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