I have a new idea for Mondays that as with all plans probably won’t survive contact with the enemy (ie September’s US TV schedule and all the new shows). It’s called Boxset Monday, and the plan is that every Monday, I’ll review an entire ‘boxset’ that I’ve managed to watch either over the weekend or since the previous Monday. Given how Internet TV is changing broadcast TV, resulting in instant releases, shorter seasons et al, I think this is a necessary response. It’s just a question of how much of a life I actually ever plan on having as to whether I can pull it off…
Anyway, we’ve had two unofficial Boxset Mondays so far, both of them from Netflix: Marvel’s The Defenders and season three of Narcos. So now it’s the turn of Amazon with Comrade Detective.
Comrade Detective
Comrade Detective is an odd beast. The ostensible idea is that during the 1980s, one of the most popular Romanian TV shows was a buddy-buddy cop show in which two police detectives do more or less the exact same things that their American counterparts did, just in Romania under the Soviet system. But it was also a propaganda tool, designed to show the power of communism and the wickedness of capitalism to USSR citizens.
Although even Stanley Kubrick was a fan, following the collapse of the USSR, the programme was then almost completely forgotten about. But now some lost episodes have been recovered from the archives, restored to their former glory, then dubbed by famous actors so that we in the West can see what the East was hooked on during the Cold War.
However, inactuality, what we have is a 6x30ish minute season of a satirical TV show created by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka (Animal Practice, Dice) that’s designed to mock US TV shows and movies of the 80s and highlight the hidden Western propaganda within those works. Although initially planned to be based on Czechoslovakia’s Třicet případů majora Zemana (Thirty Cases of Major Zeman), it turned out that obtaining the rights to an old Central European TV show and then dubbing it was actually harder than filming an entirely new show from scratch.
So they did that. They actually wrote an entire TV show, got it translated into Romanian, went to Romania and filmed it with Romanian actors and with Romanian production staff, then got the likes of Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Chloë Sevigny, Nick Offerman, Jake Johnson and – wowzers – (spoiler alert) (spoiler alert) Daniel Craig to dub their original English-language scripts on top of it. They even got in that Jon Ronson to provide introductions to episodes with Tatum, to add an air of verisimilitude. Impressive, no?
