Comrade Detective: Season 1

Here's a complete oddity, a deeply brilliant concept with an Adult Swim-stupid level of execution, courtesy of Amazon Prime. I don't know where to begin describing this one, but hang tight and I'll try.

Okay, so you know how in the 1980s there were plenty of movies and shows in America that just served as blatant Cold War propaganda? Shit like Red Dawn and Rocky IV and Miami Vice where the villains were Russians because Russians were the villains, so to speak? Movies where the bad guy is a bad guy because he's a communist, rather than, say, an asshole or a murderer or a rapist or something apolitically immoral?

So, Comrade Detective is an imagined version of the other side of that coin. Specifically, what if in Romania in the 1980s there was a cheesy buddy cop show where they just jammed the idea that "American capitalism is evil" down their viewers' throats? That's what Comrade Detective is. It purports to be, and presents itself as, a real and actual show from 1980s Romania, rediscovered and dubbed over in English for American audiences in 2017. But of course no such show actually ever existed; this is an entirely new show, filmed and created in the present day, albeit with actual Romanian actors, and actually in Romania. (Or at least actual Eastern Europeans in Eastern Europe.) And then everyone's lines are dubbed over by the likes of Channing Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jenny Slate, and Jason Mantzoukas.

It's such a great concept, and it strikes a particular chord in 2017, with a burgeoning socialism movement in America, and the complete lack of subtlety is the joke - but it doesn't always work, and it ultimately wears a little thin. It's also completely unclear to me what's being lampooned here. Is it American capitalism? Is is blatant '80s propaganda pieces? Is it shitty 1980s Romania after all? The alleged 1980s show is presented as anti-American propaganda, but by shining a light on how stupid propaganda is, are the real creators of Comrade Detective making a joke at the expense of what they imagine 1980s Romania was like? It's not clear to me if this show has sympathy or contempt for '80s America, for '80s Romania, for political propaganda pieces, for the modern day socialist movement, and so on.

I'm never a fan of explaining the joke, but here's an example of what I mean. In the second episode the main characters come upon a copy of the board game Monopoly in an American's car. They explore it back at the station, and ultimately this line is spoken:

"You're telling me that the purpose of this game is to drive your fellow citizens into poverty so that you may get rich? [Pause.] That's diabolical!"

I mean, yes - it is diabolical, and it's exactly the right image of America that would drive a patriotic Soviet Romanian bananas - but it's also, frankly, a concept that should drive us all bananas. It is the evil, greedy aspect of capitalism, laid bare. And of course the show never bothers to pause or present the virtues of capitalistic society, the same messages that actual American shows and movies would preach - that hard-working people might be able to make a better life for themselves and their families. It's completely ridiculous, but it's perfectly reasonable to assume that if there had in fact been an '80s buddy cop show in Soviet Romania, that this would be exactly the kind of scene it might include.

That the characters are dense as bricks and idealists is, of course, part of the charm. They simply can't be bought, saying things like, "why would I need money, when the benevolent government of Romania provides me with food, housing, and health care?" But the show is also, as I said, as dumb as anything you'd find on Adult Swim. (That makes sense; Adult Swim is full of stupid genre parodies, which this absolutely is.) One of my favorite moments occurs when the two main characters arrive at the American embassy, and it's just fucking enormous and ostentatious, and two morbidly obese guys are sharing a plate full of cheeseburgers in the background.

Even at only six forty-minute episodes, the whole thing does sort of run out of steam. The joke gets stale after an episode or two, and then you're just left watching an intentionally shitty and old-fashioned buddy cop show. So I can't say I loved this show, or even really liked it a lot. But I'm very glad it exists! I'm happy that a show this specific got made, and I'd rather see a great idea get executed in a slightly subpar manner than see the same old prestige antihero shit that gets made year after year.