Dept. Q First Look Featuring Matthew Goode
Netflix has released a first look at the British crime thriller series Dept. Q, from Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit) and starring Matthew Goode. The nine-episode series will premiere on May 29, 2025.
In the series, DCI Carl Morck is a brilliant cop but a terrible colleague. His razor-sharp sarcasm has made him no friends in the Edinburgh police. After a shooting that leaves a young pc dead, and his partner paralysed, he finds himself exiled to the basement and the sole member of Department Q, a newly formed cold case unit.
The department is a PR stunt, there to distract the public from the failures of an under-resourced, failing police force that is glad to see the back of him. But more by accident than design, Carl starts to build a gang of waifs and strays who have everything to prove.
So, when the stone-cold trail of a prominent civil servant who disappeared several years ago starts to heat up, Carl is back doing what he does best – rattling cages and refusing to take no for an answer.
Dept. Q is an adaptation of the novels of the same name by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. Scott Frank (The Queen’s Gambit, Godless) is the writer and director of Dept. Q. The executive producers include Rob Bullock, Scott Frank, and Andy Harries.
The cast includes Matthew Goode (The King’s Man, The Offer), Chloe Pirrie (Under the Banner of Heaven, The Queen’s Gambit), Alexej Manvelov (Jack Ryan, Top Dog), Kelly Macdonald (Line of Duty, Operation Mincemeat), and Leah Byrne (Call the Midwife).
“I’ve been working with him since 2006,” Frank told the Netflix blog Tudum about Goode. “Matthew just felt like this guy. I was writing with him in mind. I knew that he could do this and that he would lend this undeniable intelligence with his flintiness, but that he could also be emotional without being sentimental.”
“This is the second time that he’s given me a role I don’t think anybody else would’ve cast me in,” Goode added. “In The Lookout, it was a Kansas criminal bank robber, which I don’t really scream. And in this, again, I wouldn’t have necessarily seen that in myself to play this kind of role.”
“When we join the story, a 16-year-old case up in Aberdeen has been solved,” Goode says. “The optics of that look really good, because right now they’re lacking finance, and crime figures are going up.
“So Kate Dickie’s character — the boss of the police force — her higher-ups say, ‘Let’s form a cold case unit.’ She puts Carl in charge because she can keep an eye on him in the basement.”
Frank says he’s been living with Adler-Olsen’s books in mind for more than two decades. “There was just something about it. 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.”
Dept. Q is set in Edinburgh, Scotland, and the surrounding area — a shift from the novels’ setting of Copenhagen, Denmark. “I hadn’t really seen a show in Edinburgh before, and it’s a beautiful city,” said Frank.
Frank added, “When I went to go look at the city, I was like, ‘Okay, this is amazing. It’s the perfect combination between the modern and the medieval.’ They’re there side by side and it just works in such a lovely way.”
“Scott brilliantly transposed it from Denmark to Scotland,” said Goode. “Edinburgh is smaller than Copenhagen, but both are big port cities. [With its] gothic architecture, and it being the judicial center of Scotland, it’s just a really lovely fit.”
