Comrade Detective

Comrade Detective finds a middle-ground between genres with an internal engine driven not by malicious mockery, but by eye-opening insight. It slips in commentary under the guise of laughter, but the point of the joke, whether you chuckle or not, sticks with you.

The layers of this narrative onion make the characters more complex than perhaps was intended. Crafted to embody a political point, which is at the same time being skewered, they are doubly (at least) fictional. Played by humans, they are inevitably humanized, and at some point, the ironies break down and you care what happens to them, as people.

Comrade Detective stabs toward the acutely insightful and the bluntly caricatured without apparent distinction, because it leaves that distinction to the viewer. It’s not your average television comedy--and certainly a far cry from the classic model, that would deliver the expected laughs right to your living room. But as journey through film conventions and assumptions about identity, Comrade Detective is quite a trip.

Director Rhys Thomas shows admirable restraint in not applying too much period embellishment, or letting Comrade Detective become a one-joke show. It works as drama, as well as comedy, and it seems as if putting it together might have been fun. The finished product certainly is.

I can’t think of another show like Comrade Detective on the TV landscape, and while it’s a strange trip, it’s often a delightfully odd one.

It draws in you in with the novelty of its approach and keeps you hooked even though what’s happening onscreen is, dramatically and aesthetically speaking, not much deeper or better-made than a Cannon film starring a third-stringer like Michael Dudikoff. But it is intriguing, even if it doesn’t quite justify its modest six-episode run.

Comrade Detective does is not overstay its welcome. There's just enough here to sustain six episodes. That works. Anything more would have been a crime.

In one of the episode introductions, Tatum says he spent 107 hours in the studio dubbing his role, so much time that he ended up hurting his voice. There’s no way to be sure if he’s telling the truth. But if he is, it was time well and weirdly spent.

Comrade Detective certainly has its moments, but its one-joke premise may make it a tough sell for all six half-hours.

Comrade is one of those amusing-in-theory concepts that struggle to rise above the level of a cult-comedy inside joke. [4 Aug 2017, p.56]

Neither fish nor fowl, Comrade Detective is still modestly enjoyable. The Romanian actors are quite good, and the series has effective, albeit violent, action scenes. The finale is really over the top, so much so that you watch it thinking this is what Gatewood and Tanaka should have been doing all along.