Everlasting snark…day after day after day.
BQB here with a review of the Netflix series Russian Doll. (SPOILERS ABOUND)
I have to say it, 3.5 readers. When I was a kid, there were a ton of TV shows and movies were single adults partied hard and lived fabulous, interesting, adventurous lives well into their forties.
Lies. All lies, I say! This lifestyle may work for a handful of ultra rich, ridiculously good looking people but for the rest of us normals, your best bet is to find someone you can stand being in the same room with before you hit 30, maybe 35 at the latest.
At first, from the opening scenes I thought this show was celebrating that lifestyle but in reality, it is far from it. I’m not saying that 30 plus single people should be dumped on, I’m just saying there’s a certain point in time when you’re just too long in the tooth for the jet set crowd.
Natasha Lyonne’s Nadia has just turned 36 and her BFF, Maxine (Greta Lee) has thrown her a much undesired birthday party. Now over 35, Nadia must come to terms with a fact that she has long been avoiding – she isn’t going to live forever. She must find her happiness and yet, how does a misanthropic cynic who, with a dry wit and dark sense of humor, manages to openly mock everything and anything in life with great gusto find some sort of meaningful purpose in life?
Long story short, Nadia dies. Again and again and again. Sometimes in scary ways. Sometimes in hilarious ways. To put a chill in your shorts, many of the deaths (falling down a flight of stairs, accidental electrocution, gas leak) are all things that could easily happen to any of us at any time if we aren’t careful. When you think about it, it’s amazing that we all don’t croak again and again, what with our bodies being so fragile and all.
My early assessment was wrong. This isn’t a show that glorifies the post 35 single life. It doesn’t dump on it either. Equal time is given to the fact that people who act like posers and social climbers after 35 are lame, but also, to the fact that not everyone finds love easily and sometimes love and/or happiness doesn’t come easily for everyone and that doesn’t make those people bad either.
This is Natasha Lyonne’s magnum opus, her Mona Lisa and her piece de resistance all wrapped up into one. From the time she hit it big as Jessica, one of the funnier yet more street smart teens in 1999’s American Pie, audiences have gotten the sense that Natasha excels at playing jaded ball breakers whose fast talking, cynical facades mask deeper pain that few could handle, yet manage to joke about…all with a dose of Jewish guilt mixed in.
In recent years, her character on Orange is the New Black has cemented her status as this archetype and in Russian Doll, I get the impression, at least IMO, that Natasha is trying to say, “This is me. This is who I am. I’m troubled. I carry around a lot of pain but I deal with it by tossing out a snappy one-liner that will kick you in the nuts. You’ll get mad for a second until you realize that my assessment of you is correct and then you’ll laugh as you nurse your nuts back to health. Oddly, you’ll find me so charming that you’ll come back for more, which is confusing, because I’m as cuddly as feral cat yet strangely, someone you can lean on, like a loyal puppy. Although, I will bark at you.”
Was she trying to say all that? I don’t know. That’s what I got out of it anyway.
The repeated loop genre seems like it has been done to death, with Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day being, to the best of my knowledge, the first to tackle the idea of someone who has to repeat a day over and over. Other films and shows have put their own spin on it. Hell, this week, “Happy Death Day” releases the second in a series of films about a girl who gets murdered again and again only to wake up and get murdered again.
Creative? Sure. Overdone? Yes.
So why should you watch this addition to an overdone premise? Well, it’s different. Easy to say but it really is.
First, much of the series is devoted to the what of it all. I.E. most of these films focus on something the looped character must do to make the loop stop. This series spends a lot of time trying to figure out the why of it all…or better yet, the how of it all. How the heck is this happening? Nadia plays junior detective, investigating a number of theories – for example, maybe it’s spiritual energy in Maxine’s apartment caused by it being located on a former Yeshiva school, drawing her back to the same place at the same time after each untimely demise. Hallucinations brought upon by a ketamine laced joint are another possibility.
Other theories are researched and personally, I’m torn as to whether or not the ending gives justice to the how of it. I can see an argument for and against vis a vis whether it explained the how, but at any rate, the show does eventually make a shift from the how to the what, as in, what does Nadia need to do to make all this craziness stop?
The show is also different in that Nadia has a partner in crime. While Nadia keeps returning to her birthday party, Alan (Charlie Barnett) gets it much worse. He must continually return to the most unwanted of situations, reliving a scene where his girlfriend reveals that she has been cheating on him.
Eventually, Nadia and Alan meet and they must solve this mystery together. Nadia might be cynical but at least she has somewhat of a can-do spirit. Alan is deeply morose, ready to curl up in a corner and cry over the slightest of obstacles. One’s a fighter and the other’s a sad sack. Somehow they balance each other out and whether or not they resolve this never ending loop is a question I’ll let you answer when you watch it.
Stop by sometime and discuss the ending with me. Those who haven’t watched it yet, just avoid that discussion until you do. I think it is a great ending, not what I expected and it is rather complicated. The show trusts you to use your brain to figure it out and doesn’t spoon feed it to you, that’s for sure.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Not sure I see it lasting more than one season. It’s binge-worthy but I think to do a second season would be to spoil it. Sometimes all a show needs to say can be summed up in one outing and this show is that. Kudos to Lyonne for baring her soul for us Looky Lou’s to pick over and analyze, and for Netflix for letting her do it. This isn’t the traditional kind of show that network TV would go for, and probably wouldn’t exist at any time other than this streaming golden age. Also, to producer Amy Poehler. She doesn’t star in this but by backing it, she steps out of her usual comfort zone of upbeat, silly comedy and into the world of dry, dark comedy. Just don’t get sucked in too far, Amy. The world still needs plenty of kindhearted Leslie Knopes, just as it needs Nadias to dump on them.
Bookshelf Battle 