Adventures in Streaming: Netflix series twists the typical detective story

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As the woods are full of cuckoos, it seems television is filled with detectives who skate on the edge of madness. Perhaps we should blame Sherlock Holmes, who, in his later TV iterations (think Jeremy Brett and Benedict Cumberbatch) often seemed on the verge of an imminent breakdown.

You may hardly recognize the genius sleuth from the neuroses-free way Basil Rathbone played him in movies from the ‘30s and ‘40s. (Most of those films are available on the free service Tubi. Proceed directly to The Hound of the Baskervilles, released in 1939; it’s the best of a frequently bad lot.)

Matthew Goode is the freshest face to contend with debilitating emotional turmoil in Dept. Q, new on Netflix. Goode plays Carl Morck, an Englishman detective in Edinburgh. As the series begins its nine-episode run, Morck is shot alongside his partner (Jamie Sives) and a beat cop. The beat cop is killed, his partner paralyzed, and Morck can only return to the job after four months, bristling with impatience at the way the case has been mishandled by his fellow detectives.

Since the ornery Morck doesn’t play well with others, his savvy boss (Kate Dickie) gets the idea of sequestering him to the basement of the police building and announcing he will now be in charge of investigating some of Scotland’s most compelling cold cases.

In a parallel plot, a crack prosecutor Merritt Lingard (Chloe Pirrie) goes missing after failing to get the goods on a wealthy wife murderer. Morck assembles a new team to work the case, including Akram (Alexej Manvelov), a melancholy Syrian-born civilian who know a lot more about police work than he is willing to reveal. Also helping, a psychiatrist (Kelly Macdonald) with whom Morck develops a resoundingly unprofessional relationship.

The show is mostly directed and written by executive producer Scott Frank, who wrote the screenplays for Out of Sight and Get Shorty. The show’s first episode demonstrates Frank’s penchant for skilfully executing the chef’s-kiss narrative twist. And the twists keep on coming, but never in a gratuitous way. It’s a compelling mystery turbocharged by the specific nature of Merritt’s shocking predicament.

Streaming River worth another look

Maybe it all sounds familiar: A crack detective in Britain haunted by trauma, aided by a faithful immigrant underling, under the gun courtesy of a frazzled female superior, constantly courting public embarrassment and becoming personally attached to the psychiatrist assigned to help him.

That’s because the premise describes River, a nifty 2015 mystery series currently streaming on Prime, starring Stellan Skarsgård as the London detective of the title who communes with the ghost of his dead partner. It sounds like one of those old BBC chestnuts in the vein of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) — viewable on YouTube. Except the ghost is purely a symptom of River’s ever-escalating instability after the street corner murder of his partner Stevie (Nicola Walker).

He doesn’t just see her. He has been visited by the dead his whole life, he explains at one point, but they are not ghosts but “manifests,” created by his own imagination.

Written by playwright Abi Morgan, the six-episode series is a psychological thriller with the emphasis on the psychological. It’s got a stellar cast, including Leslie Manville as his long-suffering superior and Adeel Akhtar as his oft-befuddled new partner, all poignantly grounded by Skarsgård.

If you saw River 10 years ago on Netflix, it’s worth a rewatch. What strikes a particular chord these days is the way it handles the subject of immigration in England, encompassing exploitation, suspicion and outright racism. It’s an indicator of the growing racial animus that would reach fever pitch in the Brexit years.