I would like to thank Birgit Beumers, Vladimir Padunov, Aleksandr Prokhorov, and the anonymous reviewer of this article for their comments and suggestions.

1 The concept of television “flow,” introduced into critical discourse in the mid- 1970s by Raymond Williams, redefined the very object of television criticism and the approaches to its study. See Williams, , Television: Technology and CulturalForm (New York, 1975)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 For a discussion of 1990s television, see, for instance, Fomin, Sergei, “TV mezhdu vkusom i stilem,” Iskusstvo kino, 1999, no. 9:117–20Google Scholar, or Fomin, Valerii, “Ale, narod!“Mu£rtvo kino, 2001, no. 7:93–102 Google Scholar.

3 Razlogov, Kirill, “Zhanr krizisa,” Iskusstvo kino, 1999, no. 4:99 Google Scholar.

4 Akopov, Aleksandr, “Serial kak natsional'naia ideia,” Iskusstvo kino, 2000, no. 2:5–9 Google Scholar.

5 For a discussion of the Soviet novel as Bildungsroman, see Clark, Katerina, The SovietNovel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1981)Google Scholar.

6 Akopov, Aleksandr, Maksimov, Anatolii, and Fiks, Sergei, “Na anketu Iskusstva kino otvechaiut,” Iskusstvo kino, 2001, no. 4:20 Google Scholar.

7 See Zorkaia, Neia, Fol'klor. Lubok. Ekran (Moscow, 1994), 95–107 Google Scholar.

8 Vsevolod Ezhov, a “consultant on historical issues” for the Central Committee, published in Literaturnaia gazela a positive review of Semenov’s novel, and together with the “consultants” from the KGB, was listed in the credits for the mini-series. See Ezhov, Vsevolod, “V logove vraga,” Literaturnaia gazela 15(8 April 1970): 5 Google Scholar.

9 As Catriona Kelly points out, war mythology provided a “supremely efficient basis of national identity in the post-Stalin era. Unlike the history of the Communist Party or even revolutionary history, it invoked what was universally perceived as a just cause: the righteousness of the war was never questioned, even in private.” Kelly, “The Retreat from Dogmatism: Populism under Khrushchev and Brezhnev,” in Kelly, Catriona and Shepherd, David, eds., Russian Cultural Studies: An Introduction (New York, 1998), 265 Google Scholar.

10 See Arsen'ev, Vladilen, “Epokha serialov v Rossii tol'ko nachinaetsia,” Iskusstvo kino, 2000, no. 2:11 Google Scholar.

11 Los rims tambien lloran (The rich also cry; Mexico City, 1979), 248 episodes, shown in Russia in 1991. The tide of the series has been assimilated into Russian culture and language to such a degree that a computer search produced more than a hundred references, only one of which was informative (production details). The rest ranged from proverb-like use to the name of a cake.

12 Akopov, “Serial kak natsional'naia ideia,” 5.

13 Poluekhtova, Irina, “Dokhodnoe mylo,” Iskusstvo kino, 2001, no. 4:8 Google Scholar.

14 Arsen'ev, “Epokha serialov v Rossii tol'ko nachinaetsia,” 10.

15 “Mushketery protiv bratvy,” Novoe russkoe slovo 25-26 (December 1998): 25. In films like Aleksei Balabanov’s Brat-2 (Brother-2, 2000), which superimposes patriotic and nationalistic themes on what is essentially a postmodern text, this cheapness works to create cult scenes. For instance, the famous sequence of “Chapaev” shooting a machine gun is constructed in defiance of all conventions of American action movies.

16 In less than a year, Streets of Broken Lights had been shown on three major channels: on TNT in the fall of 1998, the next season on ORT (where it captured 50 percent of the audience), and then on NTV (with 40 percent of the audience). The series is based on the novels of Andrei Kivinov, who, like many popular Russian writers of detective and police fiction, used to work as a police officer. The sequels—Streets of Broken Lights: Cops-2,Tough Cops, and so on — continue to be among the top-rated Russian productions, with Uboinaia sila (The crushing force, 2000) as the absolute leader of the year. Poluekhtova, “Dokhodnoe mylo,” 9-10. For data on ratings and revenues from commercials, see Poluekhtova, “Dokhodnoe mylo,” 11-13.

17 Akopov, Maksimov, and Fik, “Na anketu,” 19.

18 Smimova, Daia, interview with Todorovskii, Valerii, “Mezhdu kachestvom i skorost'iu,” Iskusstvo kino, 2000, no. 2:15 Google Scholar.

19 Fomin, Sergei, “'Prostye istiny,’ ili osobennosti natsional'noi dramaturgii,”/s/£M.s.sfoo kino, 2000, no. 2:19 Google Scholar.

20 Akopov, “Serial kak natsional'naia ideia,” 5-6.

21 Ivan Zassoursky, “Russian Media in the Nineties: Driving Factors of Change, Actors, Strategies, and the Results,” at http://www.geocities.com/zassoursky/artic.htm (last consulted 6 May 2003).

22 Marshall McLuhan argued in The Medium Is the Message (New York, 1967) that the form of television has a more significant effect on society and knowledge than the contents it carries. The lower definition of television image prompts the viewer to fill in the gaps and, dius, engages him in a purely associative circulation of images. The “global village” of images, according to McLuhan, is more a technological than an ideological phenomenon— the position that was criticized by Raymond William and others.

23 Catharine Nepomnyashchy notes that while Marinina is not a political writer, the roots of violent crimes in her novels are often “implicitly traced to lapses in the Soviet past that are tied to the post-Soviet present by the thread of financial gain, charting a disturbing continuity between the systemic abuse … of the two periods” (177). Nepomnyashchy, “Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv,“ in Barker, Adele Marie, ed., Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society sinceGorbachev (Durham, 1999), 161–90Google Scholar.

24 Rogozhkin’s cult films of the 1990s—Osobennosti natsional'noi okhoty (Peculiarities of the national hunt, 1995) and its sequels Osobennosti natsional'noi rybalki (Peculiarities of national fishing, 1998), and Osobennosti natsional'noi okhoty v zimnii period (Peculiarities of the national hunt in the winter period, 2000)—have loose, fragmented narratives organized around drinking and bonding as the archetypal activities for Russian males.

25 The series was released on videotape under the title Menty (Cops). Kamenskaia is, in a way, a “writerly” text, with an authoritative original source and a single director (Iurii Moroz). In contrast, the first season of Streets already featured episodes by a dozen directors, whose styles varied greatly. It is all the more remarkable that the series preserves its original successful tone and narrative formula.

26 Oleg Sul'kin, interview with Vladimir Bortko, “Khochu v bandity,” Novoe russkoeslovo, 12-13 August 2000, 18.

27 Ibid.

28 On the cultural functions of crime formulas, see Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery,and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago, 1976), esp. 51–79 Google Scholar.

29 Among other roles, Lavrov played Korolev—the head of the Russian space program in Daniil Khrabrovitskii’s Ukroshchenie ognia (Taming of fire, 1972) and Lenin in Viktor Tregubovich’s Doverie (Trust, 1976).

30 Lev Borisov (b. 1933) first appeared on the screen in Sergei Bondarchuk’s Sud'bacheloveka (Fate of a man, 1959) and Grigorii Chukhrai’s Ballada o soldate (Ballad of a soldier, 1959), but his first lead role was in Criminal Petersburg. The popular actor from Moscow’s Lenkom Theatre, Nikolai Karachentsev (b. 1944), played the main part in DetectiveDubrovskii’s Dossier, where the filmmaker Vladimir Men’shov (b. 1939) appears as General Prosecutor.

31 In the Russian folk tale, an orphan survives numerous hardships and, in the end, turns out to be a prince. In Soviet cultural tradition, the orphan trope was consistently used in transitional periods. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the figure of an orphan signified the erased past and the adoption into the new Big Family of the Soviet people. See, for instance, Nikolai Ekk’s film Putevka v zhizri (Road to life, 1931). The crisis of Soviet identity in the thaw again actualized the orphan trope, this time in a reconstituted family that consisted of both orphaned children and “orphaned” adults, for example, Marlen Khutsiev’s Dva Fedora (Two Fedors, 1958).

32 Olcott, Anthony, Russian Pulp: The Detektiv and the Russian Way of Crime (Lanham, Md., 2001), 185 Google Scholar.

33 Akopov, “Serial kak natsional'naia ideia,” 8-9.

34 Spigel, Lynn, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America (Chicago, 1992), esp. 159–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Smirnova, interview with Todorovskii, “Mezhdu kachestvom i skorost'iu,” 15.