Dept. Q is Back! Almost!
Season 2 is currently filming.
Attention mystery series bingers! Dept. Q, the hit Netflix adaptation of Jussi Adler-Olsen’s mystery novel series of the same name, has begun filming its second season!
The show is about a cranky, traumatized detective at the Edinburgh police department named Carl Morck (the great Matthew Goode), who winds up being assigned to a newly formed department dedicated to cold cases, where (out of the police station’s basement, an old locker room) he and a quirky team of investigators—a stoic Syrian refugee named Akram (Alexej Manvalov), a badly injured detective named Hardy (Jamie Sives), and a police officer sidelined after a mental health episode named Rose (Leah Byrne)—who work on cases long thought impossible to crack.
After a compelling and controversial first season, the series will be making its return! Huzzah! Showrunner Scott Frank (who co-created the series with Chandni Lakhani) has discussed adapting Adler-Olsen’s second novel in the series, The Absent One, about a cold case from the 1980s. Executive producer Rob Bullock said, of the plot, “This season, Carl and his band of misfits tackle a terrible crime hidden in the highest echelons of Scottish society. It is a story for our times: rich and powerful people who believe they are above the law. Carl, of course, knows otherwise.”
The series most likely won’t premiere until the first half of 2027 (fingers crossed for a late December 2026 release), but at least we know it’s in the works!
Olivia Rutigliano
Olivia Rutigliano is an Editor at Lit Hub and CrimeReads. Her other work appears in Vanity Fair, Vulture, Lapham's Quarterly, AirMail, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Public Books, The Baffler, Bright Wall/Dark Room, Politics/Letters, The Toast, Truly Adventurous, and elsewhere. She has a PhD from the departments of English/comparative literature and theatre at Columbia University, where she was the Marion E. Ponsford fellow. She hosts the podcasst "Culture Schlock" at Lit Hub Radio. She is on instagram at @oldebean, twitter at @oldrutigliano, and bluesky at @oliviarutigliano.bsky.social.







