Comrade Detective is my new favorite TV show and if you don’t agree you’re just wrong

Vanity Fair – In a hushed tone, Channing Tatum urges me to “watch as much propaganda as you can possibly find.” After a beat, he lets out a laugh—but really, he’s serious.

Tatum stars and is executive producer of Amazon’s Comrade Detective, an eerily timely satire of Romanian Communist propaganda. Created by Brian Gatewood and Alex Tanaka, with director Rhys Thomas, the six-episode cop drama was brought to Tatum when he asked the creative team to give him their worst idea. As he explains, “When you try to find something that is not working, you figure out what’s cool about it, and you can find some really hidden gems.”

The initial idea, Gatewood says, was to take actual Communist propaganda and dub it with English dialogue—like a TV version of Woody Allen’s What’s Up, Tiger Lily? When obtaining the rights to Cold War-era television proved difficult, they decided to film their own faux propaganda, complete with a strong ’80s aesthetic.

Someone sent me this trailer this weekend with no explanation and I think it might be the best trailer I’ve seen in years? Long story short it seems like Channing Tatum told his production company to come to him with the worst idea they could think of and then they’d workshop it to find the humor in it and this is the result. Judging from the trailer, it seems like Tatum needs to give those guys a raise.

This just seems like the perfect blend of cheesy 80s buddy cop tv show with an interesting premise and an A+ cast dubbing it (Channing, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Jason Mantzoukas, Daniel Craig, Nick Offerman, and Jake Johnson to name a few). PLUS it’s already on Amazon Prime so you don’t have to wait for it to come out and if you don’t have Amazon Prime do what the rest of us do and borrow your parents log in info so you can check it out. Unfortunately, Game of Thrones got in the way last night so I haven’t started the series yet but I’m pretty excited to dive in this week. Expect a write up once that happens unless by some crazy scenario it’s actually bad and then I’ll probably forget.

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