A Very Secret Service

I stumbled upon this show by accident, and had never heard of it before. It really caught me by surprise, and my love for it keeps growing with every episode.

This show is whimsical and fast-paced, and you're never bored watching it. There are a lot of fun pokes at French stereotypes, as well as stereotypes surrounding the Cold War and a post-WW2 Europe.

The humor is witty and quick, with a ton of fast one-liners, comical sound effects and visual humor. The darkness of the jokes are wrapped so neatly, each one feels like a little present. It's old-school, but still modern, in its filming and editing.

Each of the characters are such glorious stereotypes, but even though they're made to look like two-dimensional characters, they're all deep and unique, and you love each of them in a special way.

This Netflix Original production is a send-up of the French secret service, French bureaucracy, French colonialism and numerous other aspects of things stereotyped as French. It is brilliantly written, directed and acted. I find myself frequently laughing out loud.

A show like this could quickly devolve into being played too broadly (think of "Get Smart") but this one doesn't. It maintains its edge by keeping a wry seriousness hand-in-hand with its lunacy. There are times when the show is even somewhat dark but it never loses its comic heart.

There is only one season (2015) playing on Netflix streaming video at this time. I don't know if they made a second season, but I hope so!

In French with English subtitles.

Sadly, Americans can no longer do satire, as evidenced by the billions of sitcoms with wooden dialogue and lame in-jokes that have come and gone since the 1980s. I haven't laughed this hard in years! The authentic music, settings and clothing all help to set the stage for a truly hilarious cast of characters as they poke fun at career bureaucrats, the French colonial mindset and Franco-German relations, to name but a few.

It's a shame that this excellent production has no review yet on IMDb, so i decided to go first :-)

"A very secret service" caught me by surprise. The stage are the early 1960s, relatively short after the end of WW2 and in the middle of the cold war. It's a mix of "The Office" and "Dr. Strangelove".

There is plenty of twisted, sarcastic and dark humour (at times very British). They shoot quotable one-liners like machine guns at you. I laughed my *** off many times (hint: the eastern German bathrobe).

With all the silliness they managed to create a coherent story line as well as a bunch of characters you really care about.

They mostly also use very nicely and somewhat easy to understand french, so it's good for those wanting to learn french. I'm Swiss, so i can relate well to what's going on.

Now bring on the second season, or i will get very grumpy!!

Not since Mel Brooks...Peter Sellers or even Allo Allo have I seen anything as well scripted and directed as good as this show...top of its class....i recommend you give it a look for yourself...brilliant...