Think Real Housewives with more vodka, roubles and murder, and you get a sense of just how wildly tacky this Russian-language series is. Then there’s champagne for breakfast, a fair bit of sex, and gold, gold and more gold. In fact, Gold Diggers is proof (as if it were it needed) that entertaining TV is all too often ignoble, base and mildly addictive, and here at Must TV we found it hard not to succumb.
The series follows the social climbers and super-elite of a Moscow that we don’t normally see and pretty quickly one of the said gold diggers turns up dead in a flashy restaurant. Maybe the caviar was off?
For a rather more serious Russia series, here’s Putin: A Russian Spy Story
You won’t recognise any of the stars in this Russian Dynasty meets Moscow Sopranos, but the tropes of corruption, greed and high living are all too familiar. Gold Diggers has already been a big hit in its homeland, where it is known as Russian Affairs, and now its producers are hoping that it can be just as successful globally and the critics are pretty positive.
Aidan Smith writing in The Scotsman says calls this Russian crime drama: “190-proof, white gold super-schlock!” He goes on to say, that “the women in my new favourite guilty pleasure – let’s call it glitznost – all look like they’ve walked off Roxy Music album sleeves.” In The Times Hugo Rifkind calls the series “preposterous, although I think it’s supposed to be. The first episode of the drama has so much gratuitous sex in it that you could almost wonder if it was obeying some diktat by the Moscow equivalent of Ofcom to show a bonk every seven minutes.” He admits that the detective story in part two kept him watching, and wonders if the show “will sink like a stone. Or maybe, by this time next week, nobody will be able to talk about anything else.”
