First Department (Seasons 1–5)

First Department (Первый отдел, 2020) is a Russian detective series you can watch online on iFILM. It follows investigator Yuri Bragin, played by Ivan Kolesnikov — a man who cares about cracking the case, not climbing the ladder.

Bragin comes back to St. Petersburg after a long assignment, and everyone expects him to take over as department head. He turns away from the promotion. Field work is what he wants, so he heads off to a quiet town in the Leningrad region where two young women were killed a week apart. In a place this small, everybody knows everybody, and that tangle of acquaintance slows the hunt more than any alibi. Sergei Zharkov, Ilya Shakunov and Elena Vozhakina round out the cast.

The appeal here is the grind of real police work — interviews, drives across the region, patient cross-checking of small facts — rather than chases or gunfights. If you like a calm procedural rooted in recognizable Russian settings, this one slides into the routine nicely. Stream First Department (2020) online on iFILM.