Complicated oddity turns out strangely entertaining, writes

Amazon Prime’s latest original series is a detective show starring Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon Levitt as an unlikely cop duo thrown together to find their mutual friend’s killer. Only, it’s not quite that straightforward.

In fact, Comrade Detective was made in such a weirdly convoluted fashion that it’s hard to believe it ever got off the ground. What’s even more surprising is that it actually turned out to be pretty good.

First, it was written in English by cocreators Brian Gatewood and Alex Tanaka, then translated into Romanian and filmed on location by a Romanian cast and crew. Then it was dubbed back into English by American actors, including its executive producer, Magic Mike’s Channing Tatum.

He and English writer Jon Ronson introduce the series, straight-facedly laying out the premise before the first episode begins. The show, they say, is a lost classic of Romanian television, a Communist-era series produced by the government to rival 1980s pro-American “propaganda films” like Red Dawn and Rocky IV. After years it has finally been rediscovered and painstakingly restored with the help of the “Romanian Film Preservation Society”.

It is a lot of effort to go to for a joke that you would expect to get old within the first five minutes. But Comrade Detective’s genre pastiche is so precise and remarkably well-made that it manages to sustain the novelty and become an entertaining show in its own right.

Tatum provides the voice of lead character Gregor Anghel (played by Florin Piersic jnr.), a classic grizzled rogue detective who is never not smoking and dresses exclusively in shades of brown. “You don’t become a good communist by going to meetings or memorising the manifesto,” he outlines his philosophy early in the first episode. “You do it on the streets. You do it with your fists. The rest is bullshit and you know it.” Gregor’s detective partner Nikita is killed by a man in a rubber Ronald Reagan mask after the pair defy the orders of their boss Captain Covaci (voiced by Nick Offerman, aka Parks and Recreation’s Ron Swanson) to follow a tip about capitalist drug dealers operating on the streets of Budapest. His search for the killer leads him to reluctantly pair up with Iosif Baciu (played by Joseph Gordon Levitt and Corneliu Ulici), a childhood friend of Nikita’s from the countryside. “As soon as he h — tr

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