Channing Tatum and Jon Ronson have something they’d like to show to you: Tovarasul Militian, one of television’s hidden gems. Translated into English as Comrade Detective, Tovarasul Militian was a six-part detective show produced and funded by the Romanian government to promote the 1980s communist ideal. The series was forgotten when the Berlin Wall fell but - thanks to an international campaign spearheaded by the Romanian Film Preservation Society - Comrade Detective has been located, remastered and dubbed into English for the very first time.
The series itself is a kind of Romanian True Detective prototype; a grimy tale of two police officers gradually realising that they’re in over their heads in 1980s Bucharest. The Cold War is hurtling to its conclusion, black market capitalists are flooding the streets and the oily tendrils of America’s pervasive influence are starting to wear away at the country’s once proud ideology. Murderers now wear Ronald Reagan masks, contraband editions of Monopoly are being smuggled into the city and the American embassy is slowly being overrun by obese men wolfing piles of hamburgers.
OK, fine, Comrade Detective isn’t a real show. And, for all of Tatum and Ronson’s hifalutin claims, Stanley Kubrick was never actually a fan either. Instead, it’s an astonishingly high-concept Amazon comedy; a detective spoof written in English, then filmed in Romania with real Romanian actors speaking Romanian, then dubbed back into English using the voices of people like Tatum, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jenny Slate, Kim Basinger and Jason Mantzoukas.
This all might be hard to tell at first. Every last detail of Comrade Detective is note perfect. The setting is authentic, the camera angles are well chosen, neither the Romanian or American actors want you to know that this is anything but a historical document preserved in amber. Even the most overtly spoofy Police Squad moments – the hamburgers, the scene where police officers sit in a room and chant the word ‘fist’ together – feel like they could have legitimately come from a budget-strapped state-produced East European drama about the dangers of the west. Even a line like the one spoken by an embassy worker – “Everyone in the US seems to have AIDS, but it’s still the greatest country in the world” – earns its place simply by existing in such a well-considered context.
That it even works at all is little short of a miracle. It helps that the comedy is built around a very strong dramatic spine. Unlike a lot of police spoofs, where buckets of jokes are flung around arbitrarily in the vain hope that some of them will land, Comrade Detective has an impressively solid foundation. Taken at face value, it’s only about five percent removed from something like Luther. The hero is a tortured idealist - he turned over his parents to the police aged 12 when he discovered they were intellectuals - and, when his partner is murdered, he’s saddled with a small-town romantic. They learn about each other, they compensate for each other’s failings. It’s every stock trait you’ve ever seen, pushed through the weirdest filter you’ve ever encountered.
But perhaps Comrade Detective’s biggest feat is sustaining this gimmick for a full six episodes. Plenty of others shows, like Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace and the more technically accomplished Documentary Now (directed by Comrade Detective’s Rhys Thomas), have attempted note-perfect period spoofs before, but none have been quite so laser-focused on a single reference point like this. As good as it is, however, it’s quite likely to be lost in the din. It won’t win any awards. Nobody you know will watch it. You’ll struggle to make room for it in your viewing schedule, and then you’ll forget about it the instant it ends. It’s a weird, obsessively-made series that a tiny handful of people will lose their minds over. If you think you’re one of them, what are you waiting for? Fist!
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