The Cutprice Guignol

On paper, Department Q is pretty much everything I could possibly ask for.

If you’ve been around my blog for a while, you know that I constantly hunger for Scottish-set crime dramas; as a personal afflicted with Scottishness myself, there’s just something about the patter of my homeland matched with a good, taut thriller story that works like nothing else. From Rebus to Guilt to Trust Me to Fear to Nightsleeper and then Rebus again, you show me a thriller set in Scotland, I’ll show you something that I’ll probably watch twice. Hell, I even sat through Murder Island. I’m in it for the long haul, is what I’m saying.

Which means that a show like this has to really do something special to make me hate it. I mean, look at the material: packed with great Scottish character actors like Kate Dickie, Mark Bonnar, and Kelly McDonald, with a leading performance from great-character-actor-but-not-Scot Matthew Goode, set against a gorgeous Edinburgh backdrop, from the creator of the excellent Godless, Scott Frank? I was ready to cancel my plans for the weekend and yell my guesses for who committed whatever ridiculously convoluted crime is at the centre of this story every twenty minutes until the series concluded.

But let me tell you: I do hate Department Q.

Let me make it clear when I say I love a grizzled, brooding hero as much as the next person. And Carl is dripping with potential: he’s returning to work with the case that drove him away from the force still unsolved, with a partner paralyzed in a shooting and a new department dumped on his lap to manage cold cases. But the execution here is so fucking comically bad as to almost beggar belief, and I truly cannot believe how many adulatory reviews I’m seeing of this show when the man who stands at the centre of it is just so utterly, comedically thrown-together from whatever was left over in the Big Brooding Box after Ray Donovan or whatever else called it a day.

You can practically tick them off as they come up: cynical about therapy only to start opening up to an unorthodox therapist who plays along with his stubbornness, arguing about football with his you’re-the-only-one-I-even-like work partner, contentious relationship with his stepson, grudging respect for a no-nonsense female boss, a reluctant pairing with an unlikely partner that he gradually comes to like over the course of the show. Fuck, even the football game he debates with his partner is exactly the one you would expect it to be, you know?

I’m not averse to a good execution of a well-worn trope by any means, but they’ve got to fit into the show in a way that feels somewhat natural, which Department Q drops the ball on at nearly every turn. In order to squish Carl into this character archetype, writer Chandni Lakhani and company have to turn virtually everyone around him into a toothless, sketched-in broom with a character trait stuck on it and ask the audience to just trust them on this one.

Many of the other cops are are knocked down to drooling stupidity (like ignoring a cup from a specific restaurant in the middle of a crime scene photo for four months) for the sake of giving Carl the chance to come in and put them right – his partner, Akram (Alexej Manvelov) has to give a cartoonish side-eye every time his past is mentioned to underline that All Is Not As It Seems. He tells Kelly McDonald (subjected to a pretty awful subplot that mostly involves her trying to chase Carl off her lawn with a rake, or at least, it would be if that had been me) that she doesn’t look like a therapist, intended to underline how unorthodox she is, except she’s a well-to-do looking woman in her forties with a sensible bob and that describes every therapist I’ve ever had. The writing is so clumsy, it’s hard to believe that Frank has such a run of good shows behind him – or maybe this is the magnum dopus he’s been waiting to unleash on us all along.

All this to say: I may have hit my limit on tartan noir, if this is anything to go by. It’s a waste of a great cast (including Goode, even if I think this isn’t a standout performance from him), drowning under stacks of tropes and unable to ever quite extract itself from under the pile of standard-issue cop show storytelling beats that dominate it’s script. That said, I would love to know what you thought of the series – did you find it as tropey as me, or was there enough here to keep you engaged? Let me know in the comments!

(header image via Guardian)