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Nobody likes Carl Morck — mostly because he makes it clear early and often how little he likes them. Everything and everyone is an opportunity to complain. He’s an English cop stuck working in Scotland because of a marriage that’s long over. He’s much smarter than everyone else in his department, with the possible exception of his partner Hardy — and even thoughts of Hardy make him angry, because the series opens with both of them being shot by an unknown criminal, leaving Carl with a nasty scar on his neck and Hardy partially paralyzed.
When he meets a constable from a small Scottish isle, Carl tries to feign small talk by suggesting the local weather doesn’t agree with him. “I’ve known you for all of two minutes,” the constable says, “and already I get the feeling that there’s not much that does agree with you.”
So, no, Carl, played by Matthew Goode, is not an easy man to like, let alone love. Yet the show built around him —Dept. Q, a new Netflix series adapted from the Danish noir novels by Jussi Adler-Olsen —turns out to be startlingly likable, and also sad, and funny, and scary, and thrilling. It is, like its central character, awfully good at what it does, but it doesn’t share his need to make everyone within earshot miserable.
This is the third Netflix series from creator Scott Frank. His first was the ambitious (at times overly so) Western Godless, which won three Emmys. The second was the period chess drama The Queen’s Gambit, which won 11 Emmys and made a star of Anya Taylor-Joy. Where Frank wrote and directed all the installments of the previous shows, this one is more of a collaboration; the first episode, for instance, was co-written by Chandni Lakhani. It’s also much more straightforward than those two, built for the long haul of adapting as many of Adler-Olsen’s books as Netflix will pay for. Based on the nine-episode first season, a long run would be a very welcome one.
The series opens with Carl and Hardy (Jamie Sives) being shot in what seems like a routine crime scene, then jumps ahead a few months to Carl’s return to work, where no one feels much sympathy for him because he’s such a deliberately abrasive prick. “Do you ever stop and wonder why people hate you?” his boss, Moira (Kate Dickie), asks. “No,” he says with a shrug.
When Moira is given a large government grant to set up a cold-case squad, largely as a publicity stunt, she sees an opportunity to kill multiple birds with one stone. She assigns Carl to be a one-man squad working out of a basement office that used to be a men’s restroom (there are still toilets there), so no one else will have to deal with him, and she embezzles most of the grant money to upgrade the equipment the rest of her department uses.
But then Carl somehow finds himself the leader of an entire island of misfit toys who are as broken as he is. Akram (Alexej Manvelov), a refugee who was a cop of some kind —he won’t elaborate —in his native Syria, gets hired to be Carl’s assistant, and quickly proves to be a cross between Lester Freamon from The Wire (they even both favor sweater vests) and a smaller Jack Reacher. Rose (Leah Byrne), who has been stuck doing clerical work ever since she had a mental breakdown caused by a terrible on-the-job accident, realizes she can do real work again if she transfers to the basement, and proves to be a dogged investigator who just needs to assert herself more. And Carl realizes that a new case is just the thing to pull Hardy out of his spiral of self-pity. They’ve all been discarded and underestimated, and all of them are capable of much more than the dead-end job to which they’ve been assigned.
It is, in other words, Slow Horses: PD, with a bit more warmth and significantly less flatulence. The first of these books predates the first Slow Horses novel by a few years —many of them have already been turned into films in Denmark — but the themes and tone are similar enough to appeal to anyone who’s fallen for Gary Oldman and company on the Apple spy series.
The first season primarily covers a single case: the disappearance of Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie), a local prosecutor who’s just as off-putting in her own way as Carl. (Moira describes them both as blunt instruments.) But in addition to learning a whole lot about Merritt through flashbacks and other means, we also keep up with the investigation into who shot Carl and Hardy, see Carl struggle to connect with the stepson his ex left in his care, and follow Carl’s unsurprisingly bumpy attempt to get PTSD counseling from therapist Rachel Irving (Kelly Macdonald). That last subplot is charmingly awkward, as Dr. Irving gradually finds ways to get useful advice through her patient’s thick skull, while Carl the workaholic detective starts to figure out that she’s a broken toy just like the rest of them.
The whole cast is terrific, and the actors complement one another well. Goode is an exposed nerve, ready to lash out at anyone around him for the slightest offense, which makes him a good match for Manvelov’s understated cool as Akram, who is clearly much more dangerous than his reserved and polite demeanor would suggest. Macdonald continues to be an excellent light comedian when given the chance, and plays Dr. Irving with just enough of an edge to make it clear that we should be very troubled by Carl’s behavior, no matter how amusing much of it is.
But then, among the best things that Frank and company do is to let the grief and farce peacefully coexist. This is a funny show when it wants to be, a scary one when it wants to be, and a poignant one when it wants to be —which is much more than you might expect at first. But it never feels like whiplash when Dept. Q shifts from one tone to the next, sometimes even within the same scene. There are supporting characters —like Shirley Henderson as Claire, former housekeeper to Merritt, and caretaker for her developmentally disabled brother —who seem like caricatures at first, only to wind up as key pieces of scenes that may have you reaching for a tissue or three.
The mystery of where Merritt disappeared to, and why, perhaps doesn’t need nine hours. But the pleasure of extra time spent around this group of improbably brilliant, low-fi sleuths —Rose busts out a magnifying glass at one point, while Hardy is fond of quoting 1930s armchair detective hero Nero Wolfe —more than justifies any unnecessary twists to the main story.
While Rose is using a piece of Hardy’s advice to take another go at a reluctant witness, he asks her, “Are you even a real cop?” She admits, “I often ask myself the same question.” By that point, the only question I had was whether Netflix will be able to churn out additional seasons as quickly and reliably as Apple has with Slow Horses.
All nine episodes of Dept. Q are now streaming on Netflix. I’ve seen the whole season.
