From the moment we meet Matthew Goode as Detective Carl Morck in Dept Q, it’s clear what we’re in for. Goode, his impossibly handsome self unconvincingly hidden behind a slightly unmanaged salt and pepper beard and loose clothes, is a protagonist in the Dr. House (of House fame) model. One might expect House’s inspiration, Sherlock Holmes, would be the better comparison. However, while Morck is a crime solver, his reflexive disdain for others is pure House. What becomes increasingly perplexing is that Dept Q seems unaware of what they have. Throughout the season’s nine episodes (eight screened for critics, but I held this review to watch the finale), the show can’t stop throwing distracting detritus in front of its compelling lead.

It’s a problem of prioritization. At its best, Dept Q is a character study. On the other hand, it is also a crime show with not one but two mysteries on its mind. Repeatedly, the series shows more interest in the plot than its characters and suffers as a result. To make matters worse, it is far more concerned with the least interesting of the two cases.

As noted, Morck is a jerk. That’s clear dead away. It is all over how he treats a beat cop at a crime scene. Before he can get up a full head of steam, though, a masked gunman enters the crime scene, opening fire. The patrol officer goes down, dead, immediately. Morck and his good-natured partner DS Hardy (Jamie Sives) survive, but scars, literal and figurative. The former got “lucky,” nearly bleeding to death and developing a case of C-PTSD. The latter, on the other hand, loses the use of his legs and one arm. This is the show’s first mystery, the more interesting one. It is also largely sidelined, presumably in the hopes Dept Q ends up with a multi-season run.

When Morck returns it’s after an off-screen recovery physical recovery period. His psychological issues are entirely another matter. His boss Moira Jacobson (Kate Dickie) recognizes this but is anxious to find a place to put the damaged and absolutely entitled prick. When a new stream of funding arrives to start a cold case division as an act of political theater, Jacobson sees the solution.

She banishes Morck to level Q to run it, raiding his funding as she does so. Down in that basement, a section of the station that likely didn’t know the pleasure of human contact since World War II, if not even longer, he’s made head of the new department. While initially the lone member, Morck’s soon joined by Akram Salim (Alexej Manvelov). Salim is a Syrian refugee who’s haunted the station for days on end in the hopes of getting hired, bribing people to let him stay with delicious baked goods. Rounding out the squad is Rose (Leah Byrne), another cop struggling with mental health concerns, and Hardy, contributing from the hospital and, later, his home.

Their first case, selected by Salim, who has an eye for these things, is the apparent disappearance of Prosecutor Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie). Caretaker to her brother, who received a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) in his teens, she’s last seen on a ferry with him. In the four years since, there hasn’t even been an inaccurate tip from someone convinced them glimpsed her on a street corner or through a store window. This is the second mystery. It’s where Dept Q focuses most of its narrative energy. That choice, unfortunately, never makes it especially compelling. It isn’t that there are no surprises to the plotline. There are. But they come lugubriously, and by the end, the audience is too far ahead of the characters for this thriller to generate any tension.

That all brings us back around to what the series does well. It well conveys the kind of lower middle-class corners of Scotland that most of the story unfolds against. However, it does so without looking cheap or ugly. It is honest about the locations but still clearly spent the money on a talented enough cinematographer, David Ungaro, to give them a sense of depth and life. As a whole, the series isn’t well-paced, but individual scenes within the whole are impressive acts of internal pacing. In particular, there’s a press conference where Morck proves unable to keep ahold of his survivor’s guilt. It is as raw and tense as the show ever gets.

It’s at its best whenever the story focuses on what makes its characters tick, the struggles that have nothing to do with their case files. Manvelov and Byrne are excellent supporting players. That’s the case individually, but especially when paired. In fact, any scene with Manelov and another character or Byrne and someone else is guaranteed to be better than when those characters are by themselves or interacting with someone else. Sives’ role initially looked a lot heavier. The direction it takes might deny him some meatier moments, but he’s excellent as the group’s sage and cheerleader. His thoughtful cheerfulness is a good tonic to Goode’s constant sour countenance. It is impossible to overstate how important they are to the show, even if they aren’t quite enough to earn a recommendation.

It is strange to say a show as well-made and well-acted as this one ultimately doesn’t work, but there it is. Dept Q values its plot(s) above all else, so it only seems fair to do the same. And on that score, it is a very generic show, an episode of a crime procedural stretched over an entire season. There’s so much good here, but it can’t get out of its own way.

Dep. Q grumpily solves crimes on Netflix starting May 29.

Dept Q Trailer: