Russkie v Gorode Angelov

Trilogy of Murder is the title on the cheap DVD I picked up, which comprises three episodes from the series. They are episodes # 9, 11 and I think # 12 but difficult as the episode titles are in Russian on this website but in English on the DVD!

As the episodes ran about 50 minutes and this is about a 90 minute DVD, you will know that they have been heavily truncated, lots of flash forwards to the next scene and some voice-over narration to fill in the missing gaps. I can guess this might have been an interesting series to watch with the novel idea that the Russian ex-cop, Andrei Somov, helps the Los Angeles police in cases where the victims/criminals are fellow Russians. But the low budget pulls it back into the realm of docu-drama stuff like the 'FBI Files' and similar ilk.

The stories are decent enough but not really anything that hasn't been seen before in cop/detective shows and there's not a lot of original ideas apart from the Russian angle already mentioned.

I suspect that audiences with short attention spans would not have been too pleased with all the subtitles for the Russian spoken by the characters. And that probably accounts for why the show only ran twelve episodes.