Dept. Q vs Slow Horses: knockoff or equal? One season settles it

Dept. Q arrived on Netflix on May 29, 2025, with nine episodes created by Scott Frank, of The Queen's Gambit, and Chandni Lakhani. Matthew Goode plays DCI Carl Morck, an Edinburgh detective parked in a basement cold-case unit after a shooting. Slow Horses got there first on screen: Apple's adaptation of Mick Herron's spy novels premiered in 2022, with Gary Oldman as Jackson Lamb, and its sixth season wrapped this October.

Why people call it a copy

It's not hard to see where the comparison comes from. On paper, the two shows share a lot:

• a dead-end unit where the system sends people it would rather forget;
• a boss who is brilliant, rude and allergic to other people;
• a team of misfits who turn out to be better at the job than anyone expected;
• a gray British city, London for one, Edinburgh for the other.

Plenty of the coverage put "Slow Horses" right in the headline.

Who came first

The books settle this one. Jussi Adler-Olsen's The Keeper of Lost Causes, the first Department Q novel, came out in Denmark in 2007. Herron's Slow Horses came out in 2010. The Danish series now runs to 11 books, and it was already a film franchise at home years before Netflix: the first movie, with Nikolaj Lie Kaas as Carl Mørck, came out in 2013.

On the page, Dept. Q is the older of the two. On screen, it showed up three years late.

The Netflix version moved the story from Copenhagen to Edinburgh, and Carl Mørck became Carl Morck.

How they're different

Up close, the shows aren't doing the same job:

• The genre — Slow Horses is a spy show inside MI5. Dept. Q is a police procedural about a case nobody wanted reopened.
• The shape — Slow Horses adapts roughly a book a season in six episodes. Dept. Q stretches a single case across nine.
• The jokes — Lamb's insults are half the reason people watch Slow Horses. Morck is just as unpleasant and a lot less funny about it.

What the critics said

Dept. Q reviewed well. It holds 87% on Rotten Tomatoes, and The Hollywood Reporter's Daniel Fienberg summed it up as "Solid mystery, great ensemble, ample ongoing potential."

The comparison still cost it. Reviewing the season for Ready Steady Cut, Jonathon Wilson wrote that "the depth and searing wit of Slow Horses just aren't here." Apple's show has awards to point to, too: Slow Horses won the 2024 Emmy for outstanding writing for a drama series.

Viewers didn't seem to mind. Dept. Q drew about 27 million views and spent six weeks in Netflix's global Top 10, and Netflix renewed it in August 2025.

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The verdict

Knockoff, no: the books are older. Equal, not yet: one season against six, and one of those six has an Emmy.

Season 2 is filming in Edinburgh, with Scott Frank writing and directing again, and the whole main cast coming back. Netflix hasn't dated it, though 2027 is the likely window.

Previously we wrote: The five F's in Slow Horses, explained: Lamb's list only has four — and he's still right