Comrade Detective

This series pokes fun at both Western and Communist societies, and there are so many quick one-liners it keeps you on your toes trying to catch them all. Brilliantly done, clever and lots of fun. The costumes and scenery are authentic and spot on. It was hard not to watch them all in one sitting, they are that addictive. Please make another season!

No one is being exploited. Every actor that was involved got the double, double, entendre. It is done so straight faced, however, that it only adds to the elements of comedy and drama. This is wonderful, clever, television.

The bare faced communist propaganda presented so matter of factly, viewed now through the lens of history, is gold. The take on the 1980's buddy cop scenario played out hundreds of times in American Films and TV is incongruous to the 'behind the iron curtain' setting but, in being so, works. The material is a cartoon style take on the threats communist Romania may have faced from the West. The dialogue is done in an American style with Eastern European content - again this adds to the unlikely seriousness.

The whole six episodes are a blended mix of the above ingredients. The dubbing into English adds to this the idea of a throw back to another era. The camera direction is superb. The whole thing from start to finish riffs on all of the above elements to provide gloriously knowing entertainment.

The show also manages to add in ideas that will make you think on the whole failed communist experiment but also makes you think on the failures of the capitalist experiment that we are living.

That whole thing nearly, completely, failed too around 2008.

It's so close. The biggest issue is that it looks too good. Part of the joke is that Communism is better than Capitalism...but not really. Instead, we get a glossy, overproduced product that couldn't possibly be what it pretends to be. There's far too much of the West in this show to establish the verisimilitude and that is the entire genius behind Garth Merenghi's Darkplace. Darkplace showed a horrible show produced by incompetent people and it kept up that fiction. Comrade Detective only gets half of the joke. Gorgeous cinematography, sweeping camera pans with nary a trace of the grit of the "source material." If you've ever seen any Eastern European from that time period then you know it doesn't look good. Even under the rubric of "restoration" it falls apart pretty quickly.

The other issue is they couldn't decide whether it's a comedy or an homage to bad TV. There's not enough jokes to be rollickingly funny and the plot is too believable to really sustain jokes. The stuff with chess is great but they should have hit it harder. The profanity seems really out of place to pass it off as an actual TV show. Perhaps that wasn't their vision and this was the product they wanted to produce. However, just throwing a few communist phrases out in the middle of police drama doesn't create a world. It just points out that they didn't fully think the project through.

Still, it's a good effort.

I was a little skeptic about the idea of dubbing the original actors, which by the way, they speak my native language, but turned out that they added a cool flavor by going this way and really hardened the idea of propaganda. Although, I ultimately see it as a comedy, this shows is an example of how television affects politics; communism propaganda with all its portraying in the show makes it clear. Nevertheless the same propaganda happened in capitalist US as well, for example there "Russian bad guy" in movies, and still happens today all over countries, but is more sublime, its mechanism has evolved.

Overall is a good show to watch, ingenious and unique; give it a try, you will have a nice blend mashup when "digested".

it is a good try and a great spoof series but even Communist propaganda was a bit more subtle.

The Communist propaganda movie heroes did not drink heavy or sleep around carelessly ( albeit seducing an imperialist women in the service of the Party would have been perfectly fine ). The filmmakers there were also all too conscious that the Soviet block realities were grittier so usually the movies would show more prosperity and modernity than was the case for the vast majority of the population. Only the best buildings and the nicest parts of the city would appear on screen. The main character of a Communist propaganda movie would be a happy worker or collective farmer (if he was a policemen he would have started as factory worker and then promoted for his qualities), wise and good-mannered, uninterested in material wealth and devoted to the building of the "multi-lateral developed socialist society and steady advancement toward the golden dream of humanity - the Communism". His parents would have been also of "healthy social origin" - also workers, peasants, socialist intellectuals, etc.

Albeit snitching for the regime was encouraged it would have been glorified - the persons reported to the authorities would be portrayed in a more negative manner and the person reporting to the authorities would appear more heroic and occupying the higher moral ground ( eventually he/she would have tried to educate the "traitor to the people" but be rebuffed/ laughed at).

Communist movie makers watched Hollywood movies and would know how to tweak its recipes in the service of the Party.