Malanowski and Partners

Malanowski and Partners / Malanowski i Partnerzy

Published: April 30, 2017

Malanowski and Partners (Malanowski i Partnerzy) is a Polish crime TV series that aired from 2009 to 2016. It ran for 16 seasons, and there are more than 800 half-hour episodes.

The show takes place in Warsaw and is about Detective Malanowski and his partners at the detective agency he runs. The show follows the detectives as they solve crimes in Warsaw and surrounding areas. The four main characters who were on the show for most or all of its run are Bronisław Malanowski (played by Bronisław Cieślak) and his assistant detectives Marek Krupski (for some reason played by an actor of the same name), Magdalena Dębska (Magdalena Rembacz), and Tomasz Orlik (Tomasz Mandes).

The show has been nominated for Telekamera awards (Poland’s TV awards) several times, in 2010 and 2014. It was pretty popular; as of 2015, it had an average of 1.7 million viewers per episode. It ran on Polsat, one of Poland’s most widely watched private TV channels. After it stopped airing in 2016, its slot was taken over by the new series Rescue 112 (Na ratunek 112). Rescue is about the people who work at Poland’s equivalent of 911, dispatching emergency services. Polsat’s gap in crime shows created by the loss of Malanowski has been filled by another new show, Cops (Gliniarze).

Cieślak, who plays the main character on Malanowski, is best known for his work as the lead actor on 07 Come In (07 zgłoś się), a highly popular Polish crime/police show from the Soviet era. He also spent several years as a deputy in the Sejm (the Polish Parliament), representing a left-wing party. Krupski, who plays an assistant detective on Malanowski, had a brief role in the long-running soap opera Colors of Happiness (Barwy szczęścia), though he is best known for Malanowski. Both Rembacz and Mandes, who play other detective assistants, have pretty long film and TV resumes; notably, they’ve both acted in another popular Polish soap opera, First Love (Pierwsza miłość), though not at the same time.

Directors: Agnieszka Trzos, Mariusz Wojaczek, Krzysztof Świetlik, Szymon Jakubowski
Stars: Bronisław Cieślak, Marek Krupski, Magdalena Rembacz, Tomasz Mandes
TV channel: Polsat

The show’s official website.

A clip from episode 253 (full episodes can be found elsewhere on the Web):

About the author

Julie Hersh

Julie studied Russian as a Second Language in Irkutsk and before that, Bishkek, with SRAS's Home and Abroad Scholarship program, with the goal of someday having some sort of Russia/Eurasia-related career. She recently got her master’s degree from the University of Glasgow and the University of Tartu, where she studied women’s dissent in Soviet Russia. She also has a bachelor’s degree in literature from Yale. Some of her favorite Russian authors are Sorokin, Shishkin, Il’f and Petrov, and Akhmatova. In her spare time Julie cautiously practices martial arts, reads feminist websites, and taste-tests instant coffee for her blog.

Program attended: Home and Abroad Scholar

View all posts by: Julie Hersh