Il commissario Montalbano 

I have to admit that every time I watched this series on TV, my feelings were a mix bag full of disgust, ridiculousness and helplessness. Allow me to tell you why: This series is supposed to be a quite serious drama, because it involved murders, homicides, heavy crimes, thefts, forgeries, assaults, drugs and so on that needed Montalbano and his detective on that island to solve those crimes. But the amateurish screenplay writer didn't know the exact procedures of police works, he just dreamed up everything that he thought to be easily and conveniently added into the storyline, the scenarios and the plot. His poor logic also could not distinguish what a police drama should be, all he could come up was just "would be(s)". Nor he could distinguish the genres between drama and comedy or, comedy and farce.

In order to dramatize the series for those who got the same problems of logic, I mean, the viewers, this screenplay writer had made Luca Zingaretti who played the role as Commissario Salvo Montalbano, a quite old, bald, short built, bow-legged actor, to become a sex symbol from Italy, making lot of female characters fell for him, allowing him to get involved in a lot of romantic entanglements, and then finally, got him a fiancée from Genoa, a much taller woman who always threatened to leave him and dissolve the long and tiresome engagement.

Since the screenplay writer could not clearly distinguish what a drama from a comedy or a farce, what qualifications needed to be a policeman, he put a guy, a very controversial character, an actor named Angelo Russo, to play the role of Agente Catarella, a extremely stupid yet extremely capable character in the police force, as the receptionist, phone answering shtick, a clumsy, awkward almost to a moron-level stupid guy to be a policeman, and at the same time, since the screenplay writer did not have the basic education in logic, he also made the stupid guy a quite competitive and smart computer researcher. What a baloney! A moron/clown-like guy could be a policeman? It only happened in a Italian TV series.

Then again, there were countless problematic flaws in the directing and the editing. For instance, let's just take from those scenes from the latest Season3, the poor sequences of the different times of the day were just astounding: You have to pay closer attention to how they poorly edited and patched the sequences of the time; they left from the place to investigate a crime scene at night, yet when the next scene appeared, it suddenly became a day time with sunshine. Are you telling me, from A place to the B location needed at least 12 hours on that island? When Montalbano met his fiancée in the broad daylight, then suddenly in the next scene coming up, it was after dark late at night; again, meeting in the early afternoon outside of the police station, then got in the car, drove away, then reached the restaurant around 8:00PM? How far they went? they drove from the east of the island to a restaurant on the west side? There were so many scenes and settings that couldn't link logically. I just wish that I could be an Italian, then all the stupid arrangements and the logic problems would be solved and disappeared. Then again, there is a very encouraging message to those who are bald, short built with bow legs and over 50s, don't be in despair, guys, you could be as sexy as the main character, Commissario Salvo Montalbano.