L'ispettore Coliandro

L'ispettore Coliandro is a series of Italian tongue-in-cheek television movies directed by Marco Manetti and Antonio Manetti (collectively Manetti Bros.), and written by the crime writer Carlo Lucarelli and starring Giampaolo Morelli in the title role of the Inspector Coliandro. According to the actors and the directors,^[1] Coliandro is an Italian crime television series aimed "at young audiences."

The policemen in Italian fiction and shows like Il commissario Montalbano are stalwart servants of the law, and usually save the day.

Inspector Coliandro saves the day also, but mostly by a combination (according to one of the actors) "of luck and [his younger partner's] intuition." He is ignorant, crude, and despised by all his colleagues except his partner, who is the only one who views him the way he views himself: as a hero worthy of the good guys in American cop movies.

The humor of the series is manifest in the difference between the way Coliandro sees himself and the way the rest of the world sees him. Coliandro's very name is a play on the Italian word coglione - a word literally meaning "ball", but most usually used with the meaning of "asshole" - and he must continually correct its pronunciation.

One notable characteristic of the "Coliandro" series is that all its episodes are shot in the city of Bologna, or its immediate surroundings. This has led to some criticisms in Italy as, although it's a quite important city in the country - mostly due to its university and its role as a cultural center, it is too much a reduced stage to be credibly involved in some of the events depicted in the show.

Production

The series has hitherto consisted of five seasons of four episodes each, the fourth has 2 and fifth has 6.The first season was aired in 2006, the second in 2009, the third in 2010. Giampaolo Morelli (Coliandro), Alessandro Rossi (commissioner De Zan), Veronica Logan (prosecutor Longhi), and Giuseppe Soleri (agent Gargiulo, Coliandro's partner) reprised their roles in the second season; the rest of the cast was rotated.

Plot

Coliandro is a detective that works in Bologna. His peculiar ability of being, at the same time, brave, reckless and particularly non observant put him in many dangerous situations.

In most of the episodes Coliandro tries to investigate cases that are more interesting of the ones that he’s been assigned to; this result in him being punished and assigned to “boring” white collar jobs such as making passports. During his unauthorized investigations he is often helped by two of his colleagues Trombetti and Gargiulo, but obstacled by superior officers that dismiss him and consider him a joke.

In every case Coliandro is helped by a girl (a victim or a witness) and he always hopelessly falls in love with her but he is, inexorably, dumped at the end of every case. Coliandro seems to be able to close every case with a combination of stubbornness and luck but at the end is always punished due to his “unprofessional behaviour”.

References

1. ↑ "Coliandro official site". RAI. Retrieved 2009-06-06. 

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to L'ispettore Coliandro.

• Official site