Dept. Q is a Netflix crime drama created by Scott Frank, the writer-director behind The Queen's Gambit and Godless, adapting the best-selling Department Q novels by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. In a canny twist on the Nordic-noir source material, Frank relocates the action from Copenhagen to a wintry, gothic Edinburgh, using the Scottish city's shadowed closes and grey stone as an atmospheric backdrop for a story about buried guilt and colder cases. The result is a prestige procedural with literary polish and a distinctly bleak sense of humor.

Matthew Goode stars as DCI Carl Morck, a brilliant but abrasive detective whose arrogance has alienated nearly everyone around him. After a shooting leaves one colleague dead and another paralyzed, a guilt-ridden and unwanted Morck is exiled to the basement to run Department Q, a newly created cold-case unit that is really a public-relations gesture. There, with an unlikely team including the enigmatic Akram (Alexej Manvelov), he reopens the disappearance of prosecutor Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie), a case everyone else has given up on. Kelly Macdonald, Kate Dickie, and Leah Byrne round out the ensemble.

Critics embraced the series as one of the year's most satisfying crime dramas, praising Goode's prickly, against-type lead performance and Frank's patient, character-first storytelling. It became a hit for Netflix and was renewed for a second season within months of its debut, confirming appetite for more of Morck's gloomy, meticulous detective work. It streams on Netflix.