Comrade Detective

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".

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.

First off let's set the record... this isn't an actual show that aired of Romanian TV back in the 80's , it's meant to lead you to believe it was. Some of the actors playing the characters that are being dubbed by some of today's actors where not even born in the 1980's ... but the show is pretty good either way.

I absolutely loved this show and I hope there's a second season as some point! Tell you what's as funny as the show though! Some of these reviews where people thought it was a real show! Haha. I think my favourite comment from one reviewer was something about it being dubbed was annoying, and why the hell did they put them on when the Romanian actors had done such a good job!? Haha. I think the whole point flew straight over their head! The vast majority of Americans are too lazy to read subtitles, they certainly wouldn't watch an 80s Romanian cop show without it being dubbed. Even in one episode at the beginning Channing & Jon Ronson explain why they went the dubbed route for the supposedly "real show". I'm guessing the reviewer didn't make it to that episode before he'd made his mind up!

It's basically just really silly and over the top with very subtle lines that I personally found hilarious. For me there was a laugh a minute. I loved it from the get go. I'm lucky to have even heard about it really, I'm a huge Jon Ronson fan, of his books, audio books, and films he's credited with so I was just googling what he'd done lately and that's how I came across this, as I'd not heard about it prior, so I'm glad I did that google search as like I said, I really loved the show.

The only let down for me, and which stopped me from giving it a 10, was the ending of the finale, It is an absolutely stupid show with outrageous scenarios but even with that in mind I felt the ending was just a little too much! I won't go into it with spoilers but yeah, I just felt a tad let down with that.

It did say "to be continued" after that last episode anyway so here's to hoping for a 2nd season.