COMRADE DETECTIVE.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick
• Position: TV - Television program review - Brief article

Billed as "the greatest '80s Romanian detective show you've never seen," Comrade Detective is one of the smartest and funniest shows to grace whatever we call the small screen these days. Ostensibly a recently recovered and just-dubbed-into-English program from Nicolae Ceausescu's brutal fiefdom but in reality an Amazon Original production shot on location last year with leading Romanian actors, Comrade Detective follows Bucharest cops Gregor Anghel (voiced by Channing Tatum) and losif Baciu (voiced by Joseph Gordon-Levitt) as they track down the killer of their mutual friend and former partner, search for an elusive murderer in a Ronald Reagan mask, and bust black marketeers giving away Jordache jeans (pronounced "Jor-dah-kee") to stoke insatiable Western-style materialism among Romanians.

The show deftly parodies conventions of both cop shows and Cold War thrillers while lampooning the phony national...