Netflix is about to take a big swing at the messy detectives genre.
Dept. Q, a stylish new drama from The Queen’s Gambit writer-director Scott Frank, is going to hit a very familiar and very satisfying nerve for fans of Slow Horses when it debuts on Netflix on May 29. The setup is similar: In this case, a brilliant but deeply damaged cop, DCI Carl Morck (played by Matthew Goode of The Crown and Downton Abbey fame), is sidelined after a career-shattering tragedy and exiled to the purgatory of cold cases.
What’s supposed to be a PR stunt quickly turns into something a lot messier, and a lot more dangerous, once Morck and his team start poking around old crimes that powerful people would rather stay buried.
Set against the moody, gothic backdrop of Edinburgh, Dept. Q leans hard into what makes this kind of show irresistible. It’s got brilliant investigators who can’t get out of their own way, unresolved trauma seeping into every decision, and cases that get darker the deeper you dig. Kelly Macdonald (Line of Duty, No Country for Old Men) co-stars as a police therapist trying to help Morck patch himself back together, while Chloe Pirrie (The Queen’s Gambit) plays an ambitious prosecutor who quickly realizes this new department might cause more trouble than it solves.
Given the link to The Queen’s Gambit, expect that same kind of slow-burn storytelling, rich character work, and tension that tightens like a noose as the episodes unfold. And just like Slow Horses, Dept. Q isn’t about flashy action or endless twists — it’s about the messy, human side of justice, and what happens when you put society’s broken people in charge of fixing the even more broken ones.
Dept. Q, I should also add, is based on the bestselling novels by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen, whose dark, twisty thrillers about cold cases and damaged detectives have sold millions of copies worldwide. “There was just something about it,” Frank, the writer/director of the Netflix adaptation, tells the streaming giant via its Tudum site. “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.”
Based on the show’s pedigree alone, this one already feels to me like it could be one of the standout Netflix dramas of the year. Get ready to lose a few nights to some very cold cases.
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