The Interception
television series
The Interception (Russian: Перехват, romanized: Perehvat; sometimes translated The Intercept) is a Russian game show which aired between 1997 and 1998. The concept was for the contestant to "steal" (actually, be given the keys to) a car and avoid the police for 35 minutes, who were tracking the car's location via a radio transmitter. If the contestant avoided the police, they won the car. The car chase was done in real Moscow streets, and had to obey traffic laws. At its peak, the show had 60 million viewers per episode.
The show was created with the cooperation of the Main Directorate for Traffic Safety (GAI); the officers chasing the "thief" were not actors. With the odds being heavily tilted against the "thieves" winning the car, the show had the aim of discouraging carjacking, which had become rampant. As the show failed to lower carjacking rates, it was cancelled due to police disinterest. Although its ratings during its run had made it the number one show on NTV, the GAI felt producers made them look like "clowns".
The public source identifies “The Interception” as television series. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Interception, television and series.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q28457036. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1997 and 1998.
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This entry incorporates text from “The Interception” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.