Well, I thought this was a fantastic production - very engrossing, with excellent performances, artistic direction, and intelligent scripts. It's a great example of how a television mini-series, as a format, can bring a novelistic type of depth of story and character to the screen. And it's easy to see why it's still so iconic in Russia.
By any technical definition, this particular series is propaganda -- it was ordered specifically by the Soviet government in order to interest more young people in the spy service. Any maybe it did. But "Seventeen Moments of Spring" acts in a way that's completely opposite to the propaganda usually works. Instead of simplifying issues and making them into easy black-and-white decisions, this series complicates them -- dwelling on the difficulty of the heroes' decisions, and taking care to imbue the Geramans with more humanity rather than less.
It's notable and, I think, key to the series' success that the centerpiece of each episode consists of one or two long, tense, subtle dialogue-heavy scenes. The contrast of the action-oriented expectations from the subject of spies and war with the tense character drama that we see is excellent.
The integration of real footage from the war and cameos from other major players are really well-apportioned, and give the character scenes that we're watching more importance to us for our having been reminded of their contextual importance.
The music is about perfect as well, helping to set the tone. In all, it's a spy drama who main modes are subtle, thoughtful melancholy in the foreground, with the element of constant danger tinging it from the background. In that, it's tone is unexpected and very successful. More than worth watching, even for those who don't normally go in for war or spy films.
