The Soviet Union is gearing up to host the Moscow Summer Olympics in the late 1970s. Construction is underway, though progress remains uneven: out of 97 planned facilities, 44 are ready for use. Alongside bureaucratic bottlenecks and general slack, the project struggles with a severe economic downturn. The leadership under Leonid Brezhnev faces pressure and even contemplates canceling the Games. The sense of foreboding grows as Afghanistan’s preparations hint at wider boycotts by the United States, China, Japan, and more than fifty other nations targeting the 1980 Olympics.
Into this charged climate, Igor joins the organizing committee of the Olympic Games through his connections. The son of a military officer, Ivan Zorin, uses his position to shield a young colleague from recurring troubles, a stance that rubs some the wrong way. Igor works under the watchful eye of Irina, a stern, ideologically driven officer who is the daughter of a high-ranking military man. The preparation carries echoes of the Afghan campaign, tying the domestic show to foreign conflict and political consequences.
As is often noted in discussions about the series, the image of the Olympic Misha, soaring with balloons among beauties, carries a hidden meaning. The show, a major domestic release, is set in the stagnation era—an era that modern Russian cinema frequently uses to describe a slow, almost fairy-tale world. The atmosphere of stagnation feels like a subtle compliment at first, but it quickly reveals itself as a critique rather than a praise.
When Kinopoisk releases another late-Soviet reality project, Patient Zero, produced by Alexandra Remizova and directed by Evgeny Stychkin, comparisons to the American series Chernobyl are inevitable. Yet Games does not fit a straightforward foreign analogue. The screenwriter Mikhail Pokrass, in his prelude, appears to reference a line from the New Year’s almanac Yolki, created nearly fifteen years earlier, a touch that might explain some visual quirks that give the show a segmented, episodic flavor rather than a single cohesive narrative. Viewers may wonder what exactly in each segment will captivate them the most.
What emerges is a kind of Frankenstein-like quality in the series. Visually, it borrows a retro aesthetic and employs period-accurate editing transitions, yet the handheld camera work by Mikhail Dementyev—with rapid zooms and fluid motion—pushes the show toward a more intimate, documentary feel, evoking either The Office or a family chronicle rather than a straightforward sport-drama. The tone wobbles between gravity and whimsy as it balances administrative toil with human moments.
The central pairing of the young Vernik and Karpova seems intent on reimagining Eldar Ryazanov’s Office Romance. Vernik channels a blend of awkwardness and ambition, while Karpova embodies a different take on a Ryazanov heroine—at times graceful, at others brisk and pragmatic. The character dynamics are rendered with a nuance that invites viewers to weigh loyalty, propriety, and the cost of ambition against a backdrop of national pride and political pressure.
What stands out is the show’s attempt to be a drama about the people who stitched together the Olympic effort while also offering glimpses into the athletes. The scenes with real-world athletes double as a commentary on performance and preparation, portraying the grind behind the glamour. Yet when Brezhnev’s character enters a scene, the mood lightens into a rosy, almost parodic cadence, the kind that makes the audience question the boundary between performance and reality. The timing of these insertions gives a sense of how the era’s rhetoric could tilt from earnest to theatrical in an instant.
The series often feels as if it is moving at the pace of a cautious secretary-general, subtle and deliberate but not always progress-driven. In one early episode, a long briefing on how a decorative balloon will ascend during the closing ceremony unfolds with procedural detail. A separate sequence later shows a foreign delegation selecting the final Olympic mascot in a quiet, three-minute moment. The pacing becomes a running motif of delay and decision, a stylized reflection of the bureaucratic maze it is portraying.
Overall, Games seems to mirror its own subject: a blend of bureaucratic tedium and occasional mismanagement. The performances are strong, with Stychkin delivering a compelling portrayal even when the director’s approach feels soft at times. Yet the series often finds a way to generate a meaningful moment, whether in dialogue or in a character-driven beat. A standout scene features an Afghan man who intervenes in a quarrel among children, delivering a simple, humane lesson: the strong should cede, and conflicts are easier to end than they are to start. It is a reminder of the ethical edges present in a world where state power, personal ambition, and global sport intersect, a point reinforced by the documentary book Witnesses of the Games compiled by Yuri Saprykin and by experiments with neural-network-assisted newsreels described in contemporary commentary.
In the end, the current Paris Olympics appear more eventful and dramatic, with scandals unfolding around the opening ceremony itself. Games invites viewers to reflect on a recurring truth: when major international events unfold, the show often reveals more about the potential of a nation than its public image would suggest. The series invites a conversation about how modern large-scale events reveal both where a country wants to be seen and where it is really positioned in the world stage.