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Dept. Q is an adaptation of the novels of the same name by Danish author Jussi Adler-Olsen. The series revolves around Carl Morck, a former top-rated detective in Edinburgh assigned to a new cold case whilst wracked with guilt following an attack that left his partner paralyzed and another police officer dead.
“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.’ ”
Of course, Carl’s promotion to the forefront of Department Q isn’t necessarily a compliment. “She puts Carl in charge because she can keep an eye on him in the basement,” Goode laughs.
Frank has been living with Adler-Olsen’s books in mind for more than two decades. “There was just something about it,” says the writer/director. “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.”
Frank wasn’t sure exactly when he’d be able to work on Dept. Q, but Adler-Olsen was happy to wait. “He said, ‘I trust you’ and that he’d always hoped I would end up writing and directing it.” Now, Adler-Olsen has gotten his wish: Frank wrote or co-wrote all nine episodes of Dept. Q, and directed six.
Dept. Q is a procedural mystery, but above all, it’s about a group of unlikely colleagues bouncing off of one another. “If you watch a show like Cheers, you’re not watching it because you’re interested in a bar in Boston,” Frank says. “It’s not the situation that makes you watch it, or the comedy. It’s these people.”
