By Alexander Osipovich
Staff Writer
A new series on NTV has been dubbed Russia?s answer to the cult U.S. show ?The X-Files.?
There are plenty of shows on Russian television that pit heroic cops against thuggish gangsters. But the investigators in a new series on NTV face a different kind of enemy: werewolves, zombies and malicious psychics.
Welcome to the world of ?Kontora,? or ?The Office,? a show that is being called Russia?s answer to ?The X-Files.? Just like the long-running U.S. show about a pair of FBI agents who defy government coverups ? and their own sexual tension ? to investigate paranormal phenomena, ?Kontora? centers on a duo of special agents who discover something new, weird and usually supernatural in each hour-long episode.
Rather than Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, ?Kontora? depicts the exploits of Naidyonov (Yevgeny Pronin), a former police lieutenant, and Nessi (Laura Lauri), an investigative journalist. In the first episode, Nessi and Naidyonov are recruited by a shady government outfit known as ?The Office.? Led by a mysterious figure called ?The Curator? (Igor Ivanov), the Office is a top-secret repository of occult and paranormal knowledge that has existed since Soviet times, a sort of KGB-flavored version of ?Men in Black.?
Since the show debuted last week, each episode has roughly followed the ?freak of the week? formula pioneered by ?X-Files? creator Chris Carter. Sometimes, though, it has a distinctly Russian spin. In the fourth episode, for instance, some wealthy St. Petersburg businessmen ? all of them stockholders in a major shipping company ? are being killed off by zombies. It turns out that the culprit is the company?s sole American employee, who is using voodoo to manipulate zombie hit men into killing the businessmen. Luckily, Nessi and Naidyonov foil her plans to acquire a majority stake.
Russian newspapers and web sites have been quick to dub ?Kontora? a Russian version of ?The X-Files.? And Dmitry Parmyonov, the show?s director, acknowledged by telephone Tuesday that the cult U.S. series had been a source of inspiration. ?Of course, ?The X-Files? were a reference point when we were starting to plan this out,? he said.
Parmyonov stressed, however, that ?Kontora? had branched away from the original U.S. series during development. ?We have more action, more detective work,? he said. ?In my view, there are substantial differences in genre between the two shows.?
Some other differences are also apparent. For one thing, the special effects on ?Kontora? are distinctly lower-budget. The show?s two heroes are younger than their ?X-Files? counterparts, and Nessi, who resembles Hollywood superstar Angelina Jolie, is more likely than Scully to use her sexual wiles to cajole information from bad guys. Finally, the romance between her and Naidyonov seems to be moving along at a faster clip than that between Mulder and Scully, whose relationship was platonic for most of the nine seasons that ?The X-Files? lasted.
Reviews of ?Kontora? have been predominantly negative, perhaps not surprisingly for a show launched in the middle of television?s summer dry season. Some of the harshest commentary has appeared on the Internet.
?I checked out NTV?s nano-budget series ?Kontora? ? and there was absolutely nothing to watch, it was a pathetic fake,? wrote Igor Karaulov, who blogs on LiveJournal.com under the username oah.
?But on the other hand, it got me thinking about the new Soviet mythology in pop culture. Characters from the Soviet past, surrounded by typical Soviet attributes, are turning into the bearers of secrets from a lost civilization. The Soviet Union has become a land of holy wonders whose priests understood things that we, as the barbarians who replaced them, will never grasp.?
?The Office? (Kontora) airs Mon. through Thurs. at 10:45 p.m. on NTV.
http://www.times.spb.ru/index.php?actio ... y_id=18520
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