All-star comrades find sun in a cold war in ‘Comrade Detective’
The expanding enormousness of television and the pots of money being poured into it have created a new climate of possibility: The defining feature of the medium today is perhaps not its oft-stated epochal greatness but the room it has to just get weird.
A recent case in point: “Comrade Detective,” a six-episode series that recently premiered on Amazon Prime, is the sort of project that likely never would have been realized in a TV world without so many venues hungry for product and willing to unbuckle their pocketbook.
The series was created by Brian Gatewood and Alessandro Tanaka (creators of the short-lived “Animal Practice”) and floats on the star power of Channing Tatum, who introduces and lends his voice to the series. It purports to be a lost Romanian police procedural from the twilight of the Cold War, “a curious footnote in the dustbin of a Communist history,” rescued and restored after “a two-decade journey spanning four continents, hundreds of dead-end leads, and the cooperation of five international governments.”
It is nothing of the sort, of course. Like “The Art of the Deal: The Movie,” supposedly a never-aired adaptation of the Donald Trump book, starring Trump himself (an unrecognizable Johnny Depp, in fact), it is an invented artifact.
Shot in Romania, starring Romanian actors — with dialogue dubbed into English by a cast that also includes Jenny Slate, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Nick Offerman, Chloe Sevigny, Jake Johnson and Daniel Craig — it’s a sketch the size of a miniseries, a molehill made into a mountain. Its basic ideas could all be expressed, more than once, in the space of a few minutes. And yet its size matters. If you’re going to forge the Mona Lisa, you don’t make it the size of a comic book. Ambition both dignifies and amplifies the nuttiness of the endeavor.
The tropes are all in place. There is the new partner, Iosif Baciu (Corneliu Ulici, dubbed by Gordon-Levitt), a family man in from the country and assigned to dissolute city-hardened cop Gregor Anghel (Florin Piersic Jr., dubbed by Tatum). There is the usual assortment of station house characters: the mocking dandy, the hapless comic relief, the superior officer (voiced by Offerman) too eager to close a case. Barring the odd silly image — fat American embassy workers gorging on hamburgers and Cokes, the Romanian detectives disguised as cowboys — there is little to distinguish “Comrade Detective” visually from a straight, if exotic, period cop drama.
It is not a perfect pastiche. Many jokes fight against the found-object elements, including a certification from what would seem to translate as the Ministry of Acceptable Entertainment. But this is a TV comedy, after all, not an art project, and laughs are what matter — though, to be sure, some of the humor is very inside. That includes an appearance by Romanian film critic and translator Irina Margareta Nistor, (later) famous for secretly dubbing Western films (which is not to say film westerns) into Romanian during the Communist regime.