Dept. Q
Crime drama thriller. Not my usual cup of tea. 9 episodes. I have done the basic due diligence here. Adapted, or based upon the novels by the Danish Jussi Adler-Olsen. Turned into a Scottish TV series for Netflix.
I don't watch this stuff, nor do I read it. The genre of Nordic Noir, scandi crime; whatever you call it -- I know next to nothing. I feel that works in my favour judging this thing, I'm not going to compare it to the big names in the genre that've come out of Scandinavia: I've never seen or read any of those. It certainly seems like showrunners and Netflix want to cash in on their own adaptions, remakes, that sort of thing, and believe the the landscape of Scotland ticks the boxes to create a decent enough imitation of a current trend. No different to how Kurosawa's Seven Samurai inspired the format for westerns. Nothing wrong in it, unless it's shit.
I'm stunned at how this is has been so well received. After 9 hours I don't accept this thing's a "slow burn". A candle flame still burning bright over the course of 9 hours - I don't buy it. With what the show achieves (or tries to), it just makes me feel that I've caught stuff as good (if not better) than this from TV mini series of my youth: no longer than double episode offerings. The old British crime dramas like A Touch of Frost, Midsomer Murders, and Inspector Morse. Mostly stuff I caught the odd episode of on TV during the 90's. Funny, really, that all of those shows score around an 8/10 on IMDb - as Dept. Q does - and they ran for years. Individual episodes (that at most were as long as a ": Part 2") - actually score higher. I never held either of the shows in high regard. I was very young watching them. I didn't consult critic or audience reviews on the web. I simply turned on the TV and watched. These are rose-tinted glasses originally worn by a child, a teen. It's got to be nostalgia and revisionism at play... yet I'm surprised upon checking that they were that well received, even with folk rating them today. David Jason isn't exactly an Idris Elba of that era, is he? These weren't the 90's versions of Luther -- the vibe changed there -- alongside huge hiatus' amongst seasons. Alongside these old British crime shows, let's also throw Jonathan Creek into the mix. These old shows are dubbed 'cozy mystery', forming a swathe of series of British 90's crime shows. I don't recall any of them finding international acclaim like the Scandi stuff has. No one hailed them as 'slow burners', either.
Those old shows were, too, based upon the writings of novels. Perhaps not even based upon: inspired. They ran out of material and had to write some of their own at some pooints. After all, all these shows ran for years.
One key thing for me was that Frost wasn't a nihilist. None of them were. What Dept. Q does to make the main character look smart - and to justify his elitism - is to make all of his colleagues incompetent. He can waltz over to other teams in the station, and ask a basic detective question which of course, no one's looked into.
No doubt the old shows I've namedropped are a far cry from what's popular in a crime show of today, but with confidence I can tell you that the viewers of the time in that era sat down and watched them with intrigue and attention -- the main event. You could catch any episode and feel compelled, satisfied. It feels like over the slog of Dept. Q's 9 episodes, where we're dealing with quantity over quantity, where the entire thing could have been a 3-parter -- a mini series -- that people MUST be satisfied due to the normalisation of binge watching, no doubt whilst doom scrolling their social media platform of choice. Is there anyone that sat and watched this without a smartphone in hand? Can people even give a game of football 90 minutes of their attention nowadays?
