CULTURE

In the spotlight

By Anna Malpas

Staff Writer

For The St. Petersburg Times

This week, Rossia television aired a new drama series about a provincial journalist called “Hold the Front Page.” I was quite interested to see this, since I once worked at a provincial newspaper — a strange place with its own sauna and a permanent lack of toilet paper, which was often lovingly replaced by the newspaper itself. There was definitely plot potential there, but Rossia threw it all away to turn out one of its most shameful, drama-by-numbers efforts.

Sometimes, Rossia comes up with a cracker: A recent series called “Liquidation” starred Vladimir Mashkov as a police investigator in 1920s Odessa. It had an unpredictable plot, good acting and a great lead, and it knocked most of the competition off the screen.

But “Hold the Front Page” was a limp thing that somehow stretched itself over an hour and 50 minutes of prime-time television. To be fair, Channel One was showing the new season of “Lost” at the same time, and maybe there didn’t seem any point in competing with the siren charms of Sawyer and Kate. But they could at least have tried.

The series stars Yaroslav Boiko, a regular in such productions, whose unthreatening dark-haired handsomeness means he is always the hard-working, reliable doctor or architect with a cozy home life. This case was no exception: He played a reporter called Kirill who worked at a magazine called Around the World.

His latest assignment was to shadow the local police for an article. You might question why a magazine with that title would want such an article. You would definitely question why he only got out a notebook once during the whole episode.

Basically the show cast the journalist in the role of an amateur detective. He investigated a double murder with the help of his best chum — a top policeman at the local station. So future episodes look unlikely to expose police corruption in the regions. My favorite scene was when he interviewed some local alcoholics as they knocked back vodka.

One of them mentioned a suspicious estate agent after the deceased parties’ apartment. “You wouldn’t happen to have a business card?” Kirill asked. “Funnily enough,” the jolly alcoholic replied, pulling out a spotlessly white, uncreased card from the pocket of his tracksuit bottoms, where he probably also kept a Filofax and a Blackberry.

For the slower viewers, the series made sure that Kirill’s apartment was decorated with a huge photograph of him right next to the phone where his wife and nagging mother-in-law took his calls. When the journalist looked for someone with a special forces background who could have planted a homemade bomb, why conveniently enough, a suspect’s apartment had a big photo of the owner in a blue beret in the hallway.

I hate to spoil Kirill’s scoop in Around the World, but the plot was dead in the water: The poverty-stricken brother-in-law of a rich man robbed his apartment and then killed two alcoholics who saw him do it, thoughtlessly leaving an initialed lighter on the scene.

When Kirill finally nabbed him, he admitted, “I can’t actually prove that you did the robbery,” but hey, that shouldn’t be a problem for someone who drinks cognac with the head of police. The suspect made for Kirill with an ice ax, but sadly he survived to live another episode.

The reporter barely entered his magazine office, which looked surprisingly glossy and clean, and I suspect there won’t be any scenes where he lingers over the keyboard, trying to think of a synonym for blood-splattered.

Judging by the synopsis on Rossia’s web site, he will be far too busy stumbling over mysterious corpses.

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