Streets of Broken Lights

{{Infobox television

| image = Streets_of_Broken_Lights.jpg

| image_size =

| caption = Season 12 DVD cover (2012)

| director = Alexander Rogozhkin
Dmitry Svetozarov
Kirill Kapitsa

| producer = Alexander Kapitsa

| writer = Andrey Kivinov
Alexander Rogozhkin
Sergey Seyranyan
Kirill Kapitsa
Vitaly Aksyonov

| narrated =

| starring = Yury Kuznetsov
Alexander Polovtsev
Mikhail Truhin
Alexander Lykov
Alexey Nilov
Sergei Selin
Anastasia Melnikova
Leonid Kuravlyov
Yevgeny Dyatlov
Oskar Kuchera
Boris Cherdyntsev

| music =

| cinematography =

| editor =

| first_aired = {{Start date|1998|01|04|df=y}}

| last_aired = {{End date|2019|06| |df=y}}

| runtime =

| country = Russia

| language = Russian

| budget =

| related = Deadly Force
Bandit Petersburg

}}

Streets of Broken Lights ({{langx|ru|Улицы разбитых фонарей|Ulitsy razbitykh fonarey}}) is a Russian criminal drama-detective TV series anthology about police work in Saint-Petersburg. The pilot episode, known as Menty ({{langx|ru|Менты}}, literally "Cops") premiered in 1995, while the initial series ran for 16 nonconsecutive seasons from 1998 to 2019, with 500 episodes released overall and making it the longest crime series in Russia.Алексеева Ю. Е. Сериалы убойной силы. — М.: Анаграмма, 2008. — С. 29-59. — 160 с. — (Клуб любителей сериалов). — 4000 экз. — {{ISBN|978-5-903646-12-8}}{{Cite web|url=https://www.vokrug.tv/product/show/ulitsy_razbityh_fonarei__menty/|publisher=VokrugTV|title=Улицы разбитых фонарей}} The series eventually spun off another show, Deadly Force (2000—2005), that featured several characters from the original show.

Plot

The main series recounts everyday life of a typical district police establishment in Saint-Petersburg, Russia. Police officers have to face uneasy duties, some must go undercover, while others do mostly forensic work. Streets of Broken Lights was inspired in part by a similar series called Petrovka-38, recounting everyday work of a similar unit in Moscow; in part by the blatant crime rate of the 1990s in Russia. Many fictitious cases presented in the show are based on real life cases having occurred during that dangerous period.