"Branded On Court", I will write immediately and in that way, I will prevent me from inflicting the third injustice on them by procrastinating too much about the final judgment on that series, is better than many American ones!
If I were to claim that the Serbian series "Branded On Court", which Nova TV has been showing every day since last Monday, is better than all Croatian soap operas, I would be doubly unfair to it. I would inflict the first injustice by placing it in the rank of a soap opera, a genre to which it only partially reminds, especially because of the afternoon slot, but it is actually closer to what domestic soap operas strive for, so they are often presented unnecessarily as drama series.
Another injustice that I would inflict on it is that I have compared it only with the Croatian series. It is not too difficult to be better than the Croatian TV series. "Success," it seems to me, only succeeded in deceiving those responsible on HBO, but unfortunately not in being a good series. Not to mention those war series. They have done us enough damage without being compared to this little masterpiece coming from the East. "Branded On Court", I will write immediately and in that way, I will prevent me from inflicting the third injustice on them by procrastinating too much about the final judgment on that series, is better than many American ones! It deserves, to be quite clear, much more than this TV rose of mine that I give every week to the best that the program has to offer, and this week, you realized, it is "Branded On Court" and Nova TV that shows it every day. True, with a year of delay, because this first season in Serbia was shown at the beginning of 2019, but it still shows.
Recently, in the absence of a quality TV program, I reached for a movie from the B-net video store. On that occasion, I watched the Serbian film "We will be world champions" about their great successes in basketball. And I watched, of course, earlier "Montevideo, God Bless You!" about their great football successes. If the neighbors continue to make such films - I thought then – we'll never watch a film about their great success at the Oscars... The film "Ocean crossed, let's go for the Oscars", I shouted loudly then, laughing at my own joke, will never be shot! After the first week of showing this series, however, I’m not quite sure it won’t cross the Atlantic. Instead of a movie, they could do it with a series, and they should do it with this one, and instead of an Oscar, they will take its television equivalent, the Emmy. And that is, you will agree, a much bigger recognition than this TV rose of mine.
The plot of the series revolves around two basketball players of the last golden generation of Yugoslav basketball who won the championship with a small club from Belgrade. After his career, Vojislav became a game manager, and one of his first jobs, because of which no one can see him with his own eyes, not even his own father, was the sale of a good generation of his former club. His friend and former teammate Krešimir, who became a coach, but also a drunkard and a gambler, is trying to pay off big debts somewhere in Zagreb. Life reunites them around their youth club "Radnik", which Vojislav took over from the beginning only to get the attractive land on which their hall is located, in which he, nota bene, achieved his greatest success in life, but over time his motives they change so, in addition to saving the once famous club from bankruptcy, he also tries to save himself in an effort to become a good man again.
The motives of his friend Krešo, played fantastically by Filip Šovagović, are not exclusively financial. In that club, he will be greeted by his son, who has not wanted to deal with him for a long time, and he will try, when he has already failed to be a good father, to be at least a great coach. The role of Krešo, that actually ingenious but self-destructive and difficult type was tailored just for Šovagović. At times I manage to forget even that patient from "Our Little Clinic" whom he should never have acted, and finally, I see again that actor that I have always considered Šovagović to be and what he was supposed to become. And all the other roles, by the way, are also excellent. The young Belgrade actors in Bjelogrlić's work are fantastic, an indication that their cinematography will be ahead of ours for years to come, and old actors like Nebojša Dugalić, Marko Nikolić, and many others who appear in this series have once again justified their status as acting legends - something that has been very endangered for them due to the acceptance of various roles in Croatian productions in recent years.
"Branded On Court" is, to conclude in the haiku style of Flying Belgrader, a radio host whose character in the series is not shown, but only his voice is heard, and who gives each episode a special color with his philosophical sentences and thus makes the extra richness of this series: everything that no domestic series is.