Sparta -- yet another visit to Russian TV Land

Regular readers will know that I frequently act like a monkey when a shiny object is dangled in front of my eyes. That is, I tend to get fixated and head off on tangents from time to time. So, it should be no surprise that after watching and reviewing the Russian TV show Vyzhit Posle, there would be more Russian TV in my future.

Above is an opening scene from the Russian TV series Sparta (available on Netflix). In the foreground is Barkovsky, a new student who is observing his fellow students as they eat lunch in a cafeteria. In the background we see Irina Shorina, a rather frumpily dressed Russian super model, errr… I mean student, who is carrying her tray. Just then a young fellow jumps up, walks over to her, says something snotty and then tears her blouse open.

Wait -- this is high school?

Anyway, he points at her flat chest and makes jokes about it and all the male students, being red blooded Russian boys who wouldn't get caught dead trying to date a flat chested Russian super model, all guffaw in laughter. The girls are also all laughing, strangely unperturbed by a guy ripping open a girl's blouse in the middle of the crowded cafeteria.

Meanwhile Barkovsky seems unamused by it all as he pours salt into his hand, walks up to the bodice tearing hooligan, tosses the salt in his face and then knocks the cad over as he pulls his pants down and then ends it all by throwing a plate full of food into the bounder's face. A scuffle ensues, but it is soon broken up by the Russian lunch lady who runs in and scolds the lot of them. Entertainingly, she completely ignores the Russian super model student with the torn open blouse. Ah, a day in the life of a Russian lunch lady.

The cafeteria scene was a flashback, the show now moves to the present where the bulk of the story takes place. It starts with a young woman teacher apparently committing suicide by jumping out of a 3rd story window at the school.

Enter our hero, Igor Andreevich Kryuko (pictured above), who is a rather odd Russian version of a down on his luck, hard-boiled detective. He also has a suicide in his past -- his wife caught him kanoodling a blonde in his car, went home and promptly jumped to her death. Ironic, aint it? Oh yea, the blonde is now his boss in the precinct they work at.

To complete his character, Igor lives on a house boat, has heart problems, eats a lot of tomatoes, bends paperclips into little figurines and is about the most unobservant detective to ever walk the Earth.

While everybody else concludes the teacher's death is a suicide he decides that a crime was committed so he launches a murder investigation. Hilariously from that point on he spends all -- and I mean all -- of his time lurking around the high school looking for clues. Good thing there are apparently no other crimes in this city.

As he bumbles around conducting his inept investigation we discover that, with the exception of the lunch lady from the above video, virtually all the teachers, staff and students of the school are degenerates in some way, shape or form. We have a parade of liars, petty criminals, sluts, pedophiles and neo-Nazis along with beatings, peepholes in the boy's lockers room, teachers getting roofied, students getting squashed by trucks, Russian mafia goobers, abandoned children, students filmed doing strip teases and more!

Yeeesh, even Mario Cart has better graphics than this clunker

The 'more' being S'Parta, the video game this TV show is named after. The game is presented with the same sort of moral panic Rockstar's Grand Theft Auto generated at one time. The game allows you do whatever you want to, so if the kids play it they are bound to all turn into homicidal maniacs. A corporation, presumably an Eeeeevil corporation, has bribed the school with free computers to install S'Parta in its computer lab. Naturally, all the kids started playing it non-stop and they're turning into homicidal maniacs and worse as a result.

What's funny is the game as shown is a wheezing bore with nothing to do in it and, as you can see from the screen cap above, it has amazingly crappy graphics for this day and age. If I paid $60 on Steam for this monstrosity I would be pretty livid, but the kids all seem to love it.

If I say much more I will be getting too deep into spoiler territory, so I'll leave it at that. Also, the show only had one season so I won't be revisiting it like I did with Vyzhit Posle. Would I recommend it? Well, the filming is gorgeous, but the characters are somewhat flat -- it depends on how curious you are to see what a modern Russian police show looks like.

Finally, in light of the flat chested super model student in the video that started this post, I'll end it with Leningrad's song Tits. It features infidelity, discusses the benefits of breast augmentation surgery, has wise advice from Vladimir Putin, mixes in mention of the Magnitsky Act and reenacts Da Vinci's Last Supper. Be sure to turn on captions if you view it. It is probably NSFW.