DEPT.Q

DEPT.Q (2025)

Written by: Chandni Lakhani, Scott Frank
Starring: Alexej Manvelov, Chloe Pirrie, Jamie Sives, Kate Dickie, Kelly Macdonald, Leah Byrne, Matthew Goode

Netflix brings the sluggish and suspense in this tense cop thriller…..

Another week and yet another Cop TV show that seems to be a weekly occurrence on any of the main streaming giants, this time NETFLIX jumping on the success of APPLE TV’s sublime masterpiece SLOW HORSES and attempting their own sort of version, even though both shows are tonally different.

DEPT.Q jumps on the bandwagon of some great dry humour for when it decides to walk along a dark path, also offering a great team led by Matthew Goode’s Police Officer Carl Morcks, an English man serving in Edinburgh, whose “I don’t care” attitude would go down really well with Horse’s counterpart Jackson Lamb.

The comparisons don’t end there as he also leads a team – well mainly just two – one officer, Leah Byrne’s Rose, who after an incident has been desk-bound and overlooked by those around her and the show’s best character Alexej Manvelov’s Akram, a Syrian refugee who is just a helping hand around the place, but whose mysterious past, suggests some sort of service which I am guessing we will get to the bottom of as this show progresses in latter seasons.

After a shocking shooting which starts the show off with a bang, Morcks, having taken four months off, returns and is banished to the basement to run a new department where they look at old cold cases and hopefully find some sort of answers to a long forgotten puzzle. The first case – well no spoilers here, but a neat twist at the end of the first episode, sets up the mystery nicely and the hook of the case is why you’ll probably sit through the full nine episodes to see the outcome and the reasons why.

And that is the main issue. While Slow Horses skips through its story in six episodes that leave you wanting more, here it becomes quite sluggish as the hit the middle episodes, nothing really happening as we go over old ground, it seems as the investigation reaches a dead end, so does the plot, with Kelly McDonald’s therapist Rachel, showing up on occasions, just to add some reason for the long running time.

And that’s the shame of what could have been one of the best TV shows of 2025. Many may feel the need to give up by the third or fourth episode, but if they do then they’ll miss out on a rousing climax that rewards those who stuck with the ride. The cold case itself, becoming a suspenseful “why” that it overcomes many of the flaws that surrounds it.

All we ask is for a shorter season two and we could be onto a winner….