Director: Lynsey Miller, Nisan Dag, Niels Arden Oplev
Istanbul supplies both the crime scenes and the atmosphere in Turk Dedektif, a 2023 crime drama that follows a veteran police inspector working cases across Turkey's largest city.
What is Turk Dedektif about?
Inspector Çetin İkmen leads the investigation alongside his partner Mehmet Süleyman and Detective Ayşe Farsakoğlu, working through a run of cases that range from petty crime to killings tangled in the city's history and its underworld. Each case pulls the team through a different corner of Istanbul, from wealthy neighborhoods to poorer districts, and the show treats the city itself almost as a character, letting its geography and social layers shape how each investigation unfolds. Between cases, the series follows the toll the work takes on İkmen and his colleagues, tracking moments of real triumph alongside setbacks that follow them well past the closing of any one file.
Cast & crew
Haluk Bilginer leads as Inspector Çetin İkmen, with Ethan Kai and Yasemin Kay Allen playing key members of his investigative team. Erol Afşin, Uygar Tamer, Deniz Ülkü, Tülin Oral, and Dilan Gwyn round out a cast drawn from both Turkish and international productions, reflecting the series' co-production between companies in Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Context & significance
Turk Dedektif arrives as part of a wave of English-language crime procedurals that use a non-Western city as their setting rather than their backdrop, built on a co-production between Turkish, British, and American teams. Each roughly 50-minute episode leans on Istanbul's layered history — Ottoman, Byzantine, and modern — as the backbone of its cases, giving the crime procedural format a sense of place that most detective shows skip.
Where & how to watch
Turk Dedektif streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so the investigation can be followed entirely in Farsi. The page is free to browse without logging in; watching the episodes themselves requires a K-Time account, on a platform built around Farsi-language streaming for Persian-speaking viewers.