SummaryA fictional 1980s Romanian police drama series where detectives Gregor Anghel (Florin Piersic Jr.) and Iosef Baciu (Corneliu Ulici) investigate the murder of officer Nikita Ionesco is "found" and remastered with dubbed voices including Channing Tatum and Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the leads in this comedy series created by Brian Gatewood and Alessan... Read More
Created By:Brian Gatewood, Alessandro Tanaka
Comrade Detective
Season 1 Premiere:
Aug 4, 2017
Metascore
Generally Favorable
67
User score
Generally Favorable
7.8
My Score
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All Seasons
Top Cast
Metascore
Generally Favorable
67
77% Positive
10 Reviews
10 Reviews
23% Mixed
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Aug 5, 2017
85
The result is a kind of Mad magazine parody of tough-guy 1980s cop shows crossed with a Marxist-Leninist version of Woody Allen's hilariously counterfeit Japanese spy thriller What's Up, Tiger Lily?
Aug 15, 2017
80
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.
Aug 3, 2017
80
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.
Aug 3, 2017
70
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.
Aug 1, 2017
67
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.
Jul 31, 2017
58
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]
Aug 3, 2017
40
At six long episodes, it drags, and the comedy isn’t fast or frequent enough. Edited to a tighter length, Comrade Detective might deliver better on its agitprop satire.
User score
Generally Favorable
7.8
82% Positive
31 Ratings
31 Ratings
5% Mixed
2 Ratings
2 Ratings
13% Negative
5 Ratings
5 Ratings
Jan 4, 2021
10
Excellent play on communist propaganda in an entertaining package.
During the communist times, the common narrative was that everything in Romania was the best in the world, and anything capitalist (read "from USA") was bad, and evil, and degrading.
This TV show imagines what would have been like to watch an "action TV show" created during those times. It's basically a parody on communism.
The delivery is excellent and the fact that it was filmed entirely in Romanian and then dubbed in English adds to the effect. It creates a mental separation that the show is not from US, from Hollywood. It's in a far away communist land. I wouldn't want to view it in Romanian even if I could.
