Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
Are you a fan of alternate-reality series? You know, ones like The Man In The High Castle, where the “bad guys” are in charge because the “good guys” lost. 1983, Netflix’s first Polish original, imagines a Poland that’s still behind the Iron Curtain in 2003 due a terrorist attack 20 years prior. Does it lean on its gimmick too much?
1983: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: In 1983 Warsaw, a man is beating another man who is among the Solidarity resistance movement in Poland. Then he goes outside after leaving the man for dead. He sees a medical transport van, notices the dripping paint on it, then is killed in a massive explosion.
The Gist: The explosion was so massive that it took down an adjacent building. We then see scenes of other massive explosions in the other major Polish cities. Cut to 2003. The Solidarity movement was derailed by these terrorist attacks and, in this reality, Poland is still under a Soviet-backed regime, where protest and sedition of any kind is punished. Also, there has been an influx of Vietnamese immigrants due to a direct trade relationship between Poland and Vietnam. There has been 20 years of relative calm, but a new resistance movement is starting to make its voice heard.
Anatol Janow (Robert Więckiewicz) is a police detective who used to work on high-profile cases, but has been busted to a lesser division because he was too outspoken. He’s called to the apartment of a known resistance operative, who’s been doing things like photocopying bootleg Harry Potter books for underground distribution; the man is found hanging in his bathroom. Janow’s colleagues want to say it’s a suicide, but Janow isn’t convinced, and his attempts at trying to dig into the case are met with resistance by higher-ups; he can’t even get information from friends who are government ministers with the highest security clearance.
In the meantime, a young law student named Kajetan Skowron (Maciej Musiał), whose parents died in the 1983 attacks, is given a case file by his mentor, a judge who has been lately questioning if doing the best thing for the state is preferable to uncovering the truth. The case was a murder of someone the judge knew before the attacks that knocked out the resistance. Janow was the lead investigator on the case and doesn’t believe the person convicted was the one who did it. Skowron appeals to Janow to look back into the case, meeting at a place determined by Janow’s boss. Bad move; government officials chase Janow down after the meeting.
Our Take: Alternate-reality dramas are always a bit squinchy to watch. What do we mean by squinchy? Well, it’s hard to watch something that takes place today or in the recent past but know that what you’re watching isn’t merely fiction, but it’s a view of what happens if the “bad guys” win. But in the case of 1983, which was created by Joshua Long with the backing of Frank Marshall’s production company (yes, that Frank Marshall, producer of films like Raiders Of The Lost Ark and The Bourne Identity), the alternate reality is secondary to the story.
In essence, it’s a crime drama, with Janow trying to figure out how the resistance operative really died, and the conspiracy that Janow and Skowron are starting to uncover. The parts of the story that reference the Soviets or the fact that the Solidarity movement didn’t make it are incidental to the story. Will it be more significant down the road? Perhaps. There’s an English-language section where the party’s top official meets with a British operative who seems to be talking to the party leader about leading the revolution from within. It”s an intriguing part of the story that will bring the retconned history into play a bit more.
Sex and Skin: We see a flashback of the dead revolutionary sleeping with one of the movement’s young leaders, Ofelia “Effy” Ibrom (Michalina Olszańska), whose parents fought for the resistance in 1983.
Parting Shot: As the party leader meets with the British operative, the operative plays off a quote from Alexander The Great. “We don’t need sheep; we need a lion,” as we see Skowron getting up after Janow was taken away by government thugs.
Sleeper Star: We just mentioned Michalina Olszańska as Effy; there definitely is going to be more to her character as the series goes on, and it seems that she lets emotion play more than a small part of why she does what she does.
Most Pilot-y Line: Nothing really stands out.
Our Call: STREAM IT. 1983 is Netflix’s first Polish-language original, and it does a fine job of playing out an intriguing mystery while not leaning on its alternate-reality gimmick too hard.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.
