Cancel your weekend plans to binge new Netflix thriller hailed ‘pure greatness’

Netflix’s new Scotland-set crime thriller is already proving a hit with subscribers, having climbed up to the third spot in the streamer’s TV ranking just a day after its release.

Starring Matthew Goode as the rumpled detective Carl Morck, Dept Q is stuffed with twists, red herrings and complex characters you will want to root for, making it the perfect weekend binge-watch.

The new nine-part show finds Morck reeling from a botched murder investigation that left his partner paralysed and another police officer dead. The first episode sees his boss decide the answer is to squirrel him away in a basement department, rooting through cold case files.

He teams up with Syrian refugee and former police officer Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov), who picks their first case: the disappearance of an ambitious young prosecutor Merritt Linguard (Chloe Pirrie) on a ferry trip four years ago.

Writer and director Scott Frank hoped to replicate the success he found on Netflix with The Queen’s Gambit and has been sitting on the rights to Jussi Adler-Olsen’s source Scandi-noir novels for over a decade.

Wake up to find news on your TV shows in your inbox every morning with Metro’s TV Newsletter.

Sign up to our newsletter and then select your show in the link we’ll send you so we can get TV news tailored to you.

Frank said he was inspired by his love of crime dramas like Line of Duty to use the long-untouched rights after owning them for 15 years. He admitted to Metro: ‘The books, you just knew that they could work that way. It took me a while to get to them.’