Pryatki

Gritty, atmospheric and captures the bleak countryside with a sense of despair and reality. So glad they used subtitles and not over dubbed it. Best series I've seen for a long time from any country.

By far superior to any American series out there. I have all but given up on watching most anything domestically produced due to the lack of character building, plot, and atmosphere. It's all good looks & money generation. Here we have a Russian/Ukraine series that reminds me a bit of The Killing, though stands apart proudly! The atmosphere is bleakly Russian, emitting the sad, poverty stricken starkness that seems to permeate post Soviet towns. Perfect gloomy atmosphere for a tense plot of kidnapped children, their tortured parents, & a struggling police department. There is subtlety in symbolism, the moral vs. amoral, and courage vs. cowardice. No spoilers here! It IS emotional and dark in it's subject matter. Life is real and definitely painful for these characters.

The two investigators fight personal issues, which normally get in the way of a good show by stealing time from the actual crimes, but not so! Their personal challenges integrate seamlessly, almost beautifully, within the case of the kidnapped kids and practically every character in the show is effected by the blowback of the investigators' pasts. In fact, these factors hint at a second season!! Please, please let their be another...there is so much more to answer and work with for a successful 2nd season!

All said and done, those with a soft spot for Russian lit., culture, film, or basically anything of quality on T.V., give it a whirl. Patience is a virtue.

It's an earnest effort, but the results are just barely so-so. If you watch a lot of international crime shows, you've see it all before, and done better. (In particular, the improbability-meter here frequently goes into the red, sometimes way into the red.) The first two episodes are excruciatingly slow and the eventual wind-down is interminable. To be honest, I watched the whole thing only from a sense of support-all-things-Ukrainian. Had this series been from, say, Romania or Poland, I would have bailed after the first episode. As for atmosphere, it certainly makes Ukraine out to be a hopelessly corrupt, dreary, dangerous place, but then, that's what the noir genre does, whatever the location, and that's one reason it fascinates people.

No pow pow action.

Greyish bleakish russian style.

Looks decent lower budget.

No many dialogues.

Try to watch in original language wt subs .

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It's like a dark Scandi thriller you've seen before.

The settings are bleak, the story is stretched to 8 episodes, a woman becomes the main investigator and she has personal issues and old relationships, a man who seems bad turns out to be good - but most men are bad, and so on and so on.

One difference is that while you read your English subtitles the voices will be speaking Russian.

I skipped to the last episode to see if it got better. It didn't.