Streets of Broken Lights

Streets of Broken Lights (Russian: Улицы разбитых фонарей, romanized: Ulitsy razbitykh fonarey) is a Russian criminal drama-detective TV series anthology about police work in Saint-Petersburg. The pilot episode, known as Menty (Russian: Менты, literally "Cops") premiered in 1995, while the initial series ran for 16 nonconsecutive seasons from 1998 to 2019, with 500 episodes released overall and making it the longest crime series in Russia.^[1][2] The series eventually spun off another show, Deadly Force (2000—2005), that featured several characters from the original show.

Streets of Broken Lights
Season 12 DVD cover (2012)
Written by	Andrey Kivinov Alexander Rogozhkin Sergey Seyranyan Kirill Kapitsa Vitaly Aksyonov
Directed by	Alexander Rogozhkin Dmitry Svetozarov Kirill Kapitsa
Starring	Yury Kuznetsov Alexander Polovtsev Mikhail Truhin Alexander Lykov Alexey Nilov Sergei Selin Anastasia Melnikova Leonid Kuravlyov Yevgeny Dyatlov Oskar Kuchera Boris Cherdyntsev
Country of origin	Russia
Original language	Russian
Production
Producer	Alexander Kapitsa
Original release
Release	4 January 1998 (1998-01-04) – June 2019 (2019-06)
Related
Deadly Force Bandit Petersburg

Plot

The main series recounts everyday life of a typical district police establishment in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. Police officers have to face uneasy duties, some must go undercover, while others do mostly forensic work. Streets of Broken Lights was inspired in part by a similar series called Petrovka-38, recounting everyday work of a similar unit in Moscow; in part by the blatant crime rate of the 1990s in Russia. Many fictitious cases presented in the show are based on real life cases having occurred during that dangerous period.

Awards

• Grand Prix at the First Interstate (April 1999)
• Award TEFI in the nomination best TV show of the year (May 1999)^[2]
• Award TEFI in nomination best feature TV series (May 1999)^[2]

Spin-offs

Main series

• Deadly Force (2000–2005)
• Chronicles of the Deadly Department (2004–2007)

Standalone film

• Insurers (2011)