'Dept. Q' Is Beautifully Made and Unrepentantly Accessible

Matthew is pretty Goode

The Q stands for ‘Qool.’ Justin Downing/Netflix; Hannah Roman

It’s been interesting to watch what Scott Frank has done since he wrote and directed The Queen’s Gambit. He’s followed up that Emmy-winning mega-hit with two smaller shows that are both takes on detective fiction subgenres: AMC’s Sam Spade fanfic curiosity Monsieur Spade early last year, and Netflix’s Scandi-noir riff Dept. Q, the latter of which premiered last week.

Monsieur Spade, which he wrote with TV legend Tom Fontana, was obviously a passion project that Frank leveraged his heat from The Queen’s Gambit to get made. It wasn’t a commercially viable show, but as a rewrite specialist who has made a career out of doing “one for them,” he had earned one for himself. Dept. Q is a return to more commercial material. And Scott Frank is the most refined producer of commercial material working in TV today. He makes accessible luxury television. If most Netflix shows are gourmet cheeseburgers, his are steak frites.

Dept. Q is beautifully made. The lighting and composition are of good taste. Matthew Goode’s DCI Carl Morck has a signature look of pilled, dark-colored sweaters that insulate him from the chilly Scottish weather. The dialogue is as polished and slick as a Porsche, and moves as quickly. It’s witty and well-timed and always exactly what the moment calls for. (“Are you even a real cop?” a witness asks an insecure deputy. “I often ask myself the same question,” she answers.) It makes you feel like you’re watching something made by expert craftspeople. Even the expository moments where characters have breakthroughs on cracking the mystery are pretty clean.

Dept. Q is also so mass-market that you have to laugh at how obvious it is at times. When we’re with Merritt Lingard, the missing person the titular squad is looking for, the aspect ratio changes to a square — because she’s in a box. It reminds me of when in The Queen’s Gambit, Anya Taylor-Joy’s mother coughs in a way that signals she’s about to die, and then a few scenes later she’s dead. His shows have a level of sophistication that makes them undeniably prestige, but he’s willing to do things that producers with less commercial instincts would avoid. I mean that in a respectful way, mostly; if it were easy to thread that needle as well as he does, he wouldn’t earn $300k a week to revise scripts. (If you haven’t read Patrick Radden Keefe’s New Yorker profile of Scott Frank I just linked to, I highly recommend it; it’s a master of the form writing about a master of a slightly different form.)

Frank developed Dept. Q with Chandni Lakhani, a young British writer, and directs six of the season’s nine episodes. The season is based on the first book in a series by Danish novelist Jussi Adler-Olsen, and moves the story from Copenhagen to Edinburgh, a similarly idyllic but gloomy locale. The book is a famous work of Nordic noir, a popular subgenre of mystery procedural about troubled detectives in Scandinavian countries; because the show is in Scotland, Netflix describes it as a “Tartan noir,” which is cheesy but charming. It’s not a cozy British mystery, though; Carl Morck is a real prick. Everyone who meets him tells him so. He has a Dr. House-like superiority complex that he justifies by being brilliant. House really is the closest analogue; they have hearts of gold, even if they genuinely are selfish, sarcastic assholes most of the time. Matthew Goode and Hugh Laurie even look like the same type of guy.

There’s also a lot of Slow Horses in Dept. Q’s DNA. They’re both shows about a team of misfits and outcasts led by standoffish jerks that are supposed to just be doing busy work to stay out of their bosses’ hair but actually end up doing impressive investigative work.

Dept. Q is a very solid troubled detective Dad Show. It’s not gonna be a huge hit that changes the world, but the people who watch it will say “That was good, I liked it.” Nothing wrong with being an exceptionally high-quality version of a common format. It’s classier than the Harlan Coben adaptations, that’s for sure. I don’t know if Frank would be as involved in future seasons as he is in this one, but if he’s not, he’s set it up for a long run. There are 10 Dept. Q novels. Netflix finally has a Slow Horses of its very own.