Dept. Q: Season 1

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I can’t even count the sheer number of cranky-guy, asshole cop shows I’ve seen. You know the kind: brilliant policeman who nobody wants to work with and only has a job because he solved some big case way back when. While his captain does everything he or she can to find an excuse to bust him. Like say, the police version of House. This is that. Except in this case, the English dude playing the asshole isn’t pretending to be American. He’s a straight-up English asshole. Amongst a bunch of Scots. Which, to them, makes him even more of an asshole. You know, because of the whole Englishness of him. Point is, he’s a cop who is pretty much disliked by everyone, who then gets shot and somehow becomes more cranky and more disliked to the point his commanding officer (Kate Dickie) decides sticking him in the basement with his own unit of one solving cold cases is the best way to isolate him from others, keep his bad attitude from infecting the unit and maybe, just maybe, get him to quit and go away. Because he’s a giant prick.

But, hey, who can blame the guy? The guy being DCI Carl Morck (Matthew Goode). He and two other cops are ambushed at a crime scene by an unknown assailant. One cop is murdered, another, his partner and buddy, DCI Hardy (Jamie Sives), is shot and paralyzed and Morck takes one through the neck and jaw before the gunman runs off. It’s all enough to make an already bitter dude that much more priggish and anti-social. So, when he does return to his unit, he is forced into mandatory therapy sessions with the young schoolgirl from Trainspotting (who is, freakishly, a real, live almost 50-year-old woman now), Kelly Macdonald. You can just imagine how that goes. Anyhow, I guess they can’t fire the dude for insubordination or whatever because he just came back from almost getting his head blown off — an HR nightmare to be sure — so, instead, they isolate the guy and stick him in the literal basement with some moldering boxes of files hoping that he can just twiddle away his days doing nothing that will cause anyone to have to interact with him. It’s a plan — just not a very good one.

The first person to join his department — Department Q, which has absolutely nothing to do with Avenue Q — is Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov), who is seemingly just some sort of helper around the headquarters, but was formerly Syrian secret police (or something). He’s honestly the best part of the show. The actor and the character. Very calm and clearly smarter than everyone, but has a good deal of simmering menace when he needs to turn it on. A nice under-the-radar pick up for Morck. His second misfit joiner is the office nervous chaleria, DC Rose Dickson (Leah Byrne). Just this side of a breakdown, she sounds like a Mike Meyers character and looks like an over-colorized Lucille Ball. It seems, though, that Morck is the only one who will give her shot. Though, of course, he’s skeptical of them and treats them both like crap (at first) because that’s just who he is. Yes, he is Gregory House. And this setup is a trope within a trope. But let’s not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Just because it’s not exactly original doesn’t mean it’s bad. I mean, it loses some points off the top for the eye-rolling way everyone just keeps saying out loud what a jerk this guy is — and his over-the-top desire to prove them right — but the show is just quirky and odd enough to make it not seem like a carbon copy.

Remember, the remit of Department Q is to investigate cold cases. Or, more so, one cold case based on what we see in season one. Morck’s new teammate reads through all the case files and chooses one that involves the disappearance of Prosecutor Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie). Morck doesn’t seemingly give a crap and is like yeah, fine, that one. But, again, Akram is genius-level at this stuff and he has a feeling about the case. Flash to: it turns out Akram is a super-genius because, lo and behold, Lingard is alive and being held in some sort of underground tube thing by unknown captors (which is revealed to be something else later on). Serious Silence of the Lambs vibes, to be sure. And off we go, with tons of flashbacks and paralleling timelines and intersecting characters who may or may not have a hand in Lingard’s kidnapping and imprisonment. Thing is, there are actually two unsolved crimes going on. This kidnapping and, of course, the shooting involving Morck, his partner and the dead cop. The two cases wend their way around each other and make an already twisted narrative that much twistier.

Scott Frank — creator/writer of both Monsieur Spade and The Queen’s Gambit, as well as screenwriter of Logan and Minority Report, among many other things — can write the hell out of a script, but is not above making things a bit convoluted along the way. He does do a bit of that here, in an attempt to hide a ball that didn’t really need to be hidden, as well as just generally create situations that throw doubt into the minds of the audience. There are some situations that honestly feel a bit forced and not entirely realistic — like this whole plan that involves tossing a dude off a climbing wall in an attempt to stage an accident to steal his identity that he couldn’t have know would be available to him — but as I mentioned, at least the schemes and even the political intrigue that is infused (what I understood of it) felt like someone caring enough to put forth the effort to make it original and twisty. But, really, what makes the show the show are the characters. Honestly I couldn’t understand a goddam word Kate Dickie said, but that gave the thing flavor. And the other actors seem to really know and understand their parts and infuse them with both humor and gravity when it’s called for. Matthew Goode plays a good crank and is someone that — while he’s nothing like Gary Oldman’s Jackson Lamb from Slow Horses, aside from the crankiness and the way he sometimes treats his team — he does feel like one of those lead characters who you could bring back for multiple seasons of crime solving and never tire of. Especially with his band of oddballs in tow.