The Turkish Detective

An eight-part adaptation of Barbara Nadel's Çetin İkmen novels, The Turkish Detective was ordered by Paramount+ in April 2022 and made with the Istanbul production house Ay Yapım alongside Miramax Television and Paramount Television International Studios. Niels Arden Oplev, who directed the original Swedish Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, took the lead directing chair, with Ben Schiffer writing the adaptation. The series first aired on Turkey's TV+ from 15 December 2023 to 5 January 2024, then reached British viewers on BBC Two from 7 July 2024.

Haluk Bilginer plays Superintendent Çetin İkmen, a homicide detective whose method is less forensic than anthropological: he reads the city's older quarters the way other officers read a case file. Ethan Kai is Detective Mehmet Süleyman, Turkish-born and London-trained, who returns to Istanbul after years at the Metropolitan Police and finds his old map of the place out of date. Yasemin Kay Allen's Detective Ayşe Farsakoğlu supplies the instincts the two men tend to talk past. The season's opening case, a university student found dead in a cemetery, sends the trio through apartment blocks and old neighborhoods where the Ottoman past and the present sit uncomfortably close.

Critical opinion split along a predictable line. Reviewers tended to enjoy Bilginer and the city while finding the plotting familiar. The Guardian called it downright ridiculous in a good way; the Spectator called it utterly bog-standard. IMDb users have settled around 6.7 out of 10, and the show has since circulated as a comfortable BBC acquisition, with Good Housekeeping pitching it in 2026 as a Death in Paradise substitute. [edit]

Çetin İkmen has spent a career in Istanbul homicide, and he works the way the city itself works: slowly, by acquaintance, with a preference for the long way around. He knows which shopkeeper will talk and which will not, which courtyard has a view of which window, and which family has been carrying a grudge since before the republic. The show gives him a domestic life that keeps interrupting the job, and it gives him two colleagues who see Istanbul differently.

Mehmet Süleyman grew up in Turkey but built his police career in London. He comes back fluent in procedures and skeptical of local habit, and the series makes his relearning of the city a running thread. He is not a fool, and the show does not play him as one; he is simply a man whose instincts were calibrated somewhere else. Ayşe Farsakoğlu, the third member of the trio, is the one who notices what the other two miss. She is not there to translate between them, though she often does that too. She is the investigator whose read on a room tends to be right first and explained later.

The season's first case begins with a body in a cemetery: a university student, found in a place where the city's dead and its living are separated by custom and stone. The investigation moves through the older neighborhoods and the cramped apartment blocks that house much of Istanbul's working population, and it keeps running into the social arrangements that the postcard version of the city leaves out. Each episode runs about 50 minutes, and the show is built as a character-forward procedural rather than a grim Nordic thriller. İkmen's humor and his family life are the tonal anchor; the crimes are serious, but the series does not confuse darkness with depth.

The season's shape is a slow convergence. Süleyman's outsider perspective and İkmen's local knowledge start as friction and end as a working method, with Ayşe's instincts proving decisive at the points where the two men are most sure of themselves. The back half of the season tightens around a single investigation that threads through several episodes, and the finale closes that case without closing the series. Personal questions are left open: İkmen's home life, Süleyman's unsettled place in a city he thought he knew. The show was built to continue, and the first season ends the way a returning series should, with the status quo restored and the characters nudged toward further reckoning.[edit]