I’ve never watched a noir thriller on Netflix that hasn’t disappointed me in some way or another. Netflix mass produces noir thrillers, and crime dramas like Vera with Brenda Blethyn the way Warner Brothers once mass produced rom-coms. Was I never disappointed? Well, hardly ever, though some shows are more disappointing than others. Sooner or later the plot doesn’t hold up and the characters become increasingly and unintentionally unbelievable. There are exceptions to the rules. Babylon Berlin captured the decadence of the German capital and the rise of fascism, and La Reine del Sur tracked the international drug trade.
I have mixed feelings about the quirky Department Q, another crime drama and the latest but not the greatest from Netflix, created by Scott Frank, famous for the Queen’s Gambit, and with help from his co-creator, Chandni Lakhani, who made her mark with Black Mirror, billed as a reworking of Rod Sterling’s The Twilight Zone.
Lakhani was born in the USA; her parents are from Gujarat in India. Her background probably makes her able to appreciate the clash and the interactions between different cultures which play significant roles in Department Q. A Syrian refugee who was a cop in his own country brings his wisdom to bear on crimes in his adopted land.
Call Department Q Late Capitalist Noir. It belongs to a world in which dispicable men wearing suits and ties are in the saddle, international law is fucked and corporations shit on nearly everyone. The new Netflix series, which first aired on May 29, 2025, stars English actor Matthew Goode as Scottish detective Carl Morck who starts off as an asshole and becomes warmer and fuzzier as the show goes. And more competent, too, in part because his therapist helps him resolve his issues. He also assembles a great team. Morck, the fuck-up becomes a top cop.
Department Q is based on the fiction of Jussi Adler-Olsen, the Danish-born contemporary author of a series of crime novels which are set in the country he knows best: Denmark. Netflix shifted the locale to Scotland and chose an English actor to play a Scottish detective? A Moscow-born actor named Alexej Manvelov plays the part of the former Syrian cop who does crackerjack police work in Scotland.
What’s up with those shifts in ethnicity and countries? Does Netflix not recognize national borders and do all actors these days belong to a global cast of thousands that spans the whole planet. Probably.
Perhaps the worst mistake that the creators of Department Q made, in my opinion, was to move the setting of the drama from Denmark, Prince Hamlet’s homeland, to Scotland, where a general named Macbeth murders a king and assumes the throne. Shakespeare’s tragedy, Hamlet, might be one of the first noir dramas, with Hamlet himself as the detective trying to solve the mystery of his father’s death, with Ophelia as the femme fatale and Polonius as the evil majesty.
Not only do the creators Of Department Q move the crimes from one nation to another, but they also proceed to embody very little of the culture and the customs of Scotland in the nine-part series. True, there are Scottish landscapes and seascapes; sprinkled throughout the dialogue there are nifty Scottish words and expressions—pampot (meaning idiot) and godhaven (meaning God save). True, too, some scenes are set in recognizable Edinburgh locations.
But for the most part the outdoor scenes in Department Q could take place almost anywhere near or around Iceland, Greenland or Denmark and anywhere it’s wet and cold. The indoor scenes could take place anywhere there are dark basements: Copenhagen, London, New York or Moscow. Perhaps the creators were aiming for a kind of universality. If so they’re sacrificed the local and indigeneity.
In case you haven’t noticed or need reminding, noir novels, films and cop dramas derive much of their punch and their charm from the places where the crimes and the punishments occur. Moscow for Dostovesky’s Crime and Punishment, San Francisco for Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, LA for Chandler’s The Big Sleep, and Harlem for Chester Himes’s Real Cool Killers, All Shot up and other detective works that feature the African American sleuths, Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson.
Department Q is complicated, perhaps too complicated for its own good and perhaps the most complicated noir thriller I’ve ever watched. It’s so complicated in fact that Netflix offers a site called Tudum that offers a long and lengthy explanation of the crimes that detective Morck investigates and that lead him on a twisted journey to a pathological mother/son team who kidnap and hold against her will, Merritt Lingard, a lawyer they mistakenly believe is guilty of the murder of another family member.
The mother and the son watch Merritt in captivity. They torture her for four years in a 1984-style hyperbaric chamber which delivers oxygen two to three times higher than normal air pressure and causes ear and sinus pain, middle ear injuries, including tympanic membrane rupture and impaired vision.
The narrative features two brothers, Harry and Lyle, also an investigative journalist named Sam Haig, various members of the upper echelons of the Scottish judicial system, an assortment of thugs, plus Morck’s superiors and the devoted members of the team he assembles who ferret out evil, punish the wicked and reward the innocent. The characters are mostly either all good or all bad.
Few murders on big and little screen are as graphic and brutal as the murders depicted in Department Q. You might not want to watch the scenes in which the evil brother goes berserk and kills for the pleasure of killing. There’s no sex per se, though there’s some nudity. The melodrama ends happily with Morck and his quirky buddies at the start of yet another elusive cold case.
Department Q is bingeable and could provide a real diversion from bombings in Gaza, Yemen, Iran and elsewhere. I was compelled to watch until the bloody end. The acting by Matthew Goode, Shirley Henderson and Alexej Manvelov is superb. The refugee from Syria steals the show and becomes the hero of the drama.
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