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2019 has barely gotten started, and it’s already a great year for TV. This intricate, original, funny, and moving show, which I never heard of till it was released, is wonderful and likely to be of great interest to many of you. It’s complete on Netflix in eight half-hour episodes, and could easily be marathoned in a single day. And while there’s way more to it than twists, it has a lot of them and the less you know going in, the better.
You might want to stop reading this review right now and go watch it. In fact, if at any point I sell you on it, you should stop reading the review right there and go watch it. If you’re not immediately grabbed by episode one, I would keep going through episode three or four; there’s a fantastic and unusual relationship at the heart of the show, and it’s not immediately obvious what it is.
Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) is a brassy, very New York woman celebrating her 36th birthday in her friends’ loft, which was once a yeshiva. She picks up a pretentious man for a one-night stand, then goes out to search for her missing cat, Oatmeal. [Don't worry, he's fine.] She’s hit by a cab and dies.
And she wakes up back at her birthday party, exactly where we started the show, with her staring into the mirror in a bathroom with a light installation that looks like a vagina-shaped rift in the space-time continuum. She goes back into the party and carries on with her life. Until she dies. Again. And wakes up back at her birthday party, staring into the mirror…
Russian Doll shares aspects of its premise with Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow. But there’s way more to it than immediately meets the eye. Very mild thematic and genre spoilers below cut.
I don’t want to say too much, except that the raucous comedy of the first couple episodes is not the tone or genre of the entire series, though there are a lot of funny lines and moments throughout. If you enjoyed the repeated genre switches and “top this” plotting of Ash, you should check this out. (Also like Ash, it has a ton of found family feels, and also multiple queer women though as far as I could tell Nadia herself is straight.)
If you’re interested in psychology and how people deal with trauma, a lot of Russian Doll is about that. It’s also about compassion, facing your own mortality, being honest with yourself and others, and living in a big city full of strangers who might become your true love or your murderer or the best friend you’ll ever have if you ever actually meet.
In addition to being very funny and surprisingly deep, Russian Doll has some moments that are terrifying and some that are incredibly suspenseful. The final episode does things with the medium of TV/film that I have never seen done in exactly that way before, and executes it with finesse and to great emotional and thematic effect. That episode, directed by Lyonne herself, is one of the most perfect pieces of TV direction I’ve ever seen.
I might just go back and rewatch the entire thing from the beginning. It’s a marvel.
The entire creative team was female, and it’s amazing how different that makes the whole show feel from almost every other TV show I’ve seen. It really highlights how few women are TV creators and showrunners. I’m not talking about any "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus“ bullshit, but how many both big and little moments involve the lived experience of being a woman in America in a way I just don’t normally see. (It doesn't help that many male creators seem to believe that men are from Earth, and women are aliens from another dimension.)
There's a lot of diversity in terms of race, religion, and sexual orientation. I particularly enjoyed the parts that involved Judaism, which felt true to my own experience in a way that, again, I have never seen on TV before.
If anyone’s already seen Russian Doll, or sees it later, let me know and I’ll put up a spoiler post so we can talk about it.
You might want to stop reading this review right now and go watch it. In fact, if at any point I sell you on it, you should stop reading the review right there and go watch it. If you’re not immediately grabbed by episode one, I would keep going through episode three or four; there’s a fantastic and unusual relationship at the heart of the show, and it’s not immediately obvious what it is.
Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) is a brassy, very New York woman celebrating her 36th birthday in her friends’ loft, which was once a yeshiva. She picks up a pretentious man for a one-night stand, then goes out to search for her missing cat, Oatmeal. [Don't worry, he's fine.] She’s hit by a cab and dies.
And she wakes up back at her birthday party, exactly where we started the show, with her staring into the mirror in a bathroom with a light installation that looks like a vagina-shaped rift in the space-time continuum. She goes back into the party and carries on with her life. Until she dies. Again. And wakes up back at her birthday party, staring into the mirror…
Russian Doll shares aspects of its premise with Groundhog Day and Edge of Tomorrow. But there’s way more to it than immediately meets the eye. Very mild thematic and genre spoilers below cut.
I don’t want to say too much, except that the raucous comedy of the first couple episodes is not the tone or genre of the entire series, though there are a lot of funny lines and moments throughout. If you enjoyed the repeated genre switches and “top this” plotting of Ash, you should check this out. (Also like Ash, it has a ton of found family feels, and also multiple queer women though as far as I could tell Nadia herself is straight.)
If you’re interested in psychology and how people deal with trauma, a lot of Russian Doll is about that. It’s also about compassion, facing your own mortality, being honest with yourself and others, and living in a big city full of strangers who might become your true love or your murderer or the best friend you’ll ever have if you ever actually meet.
In addition to being very funny and surprisingly deep, Russian Doll has some moments that are terrifying and some that are incredibly suspenseful. The final episode does things with the medium of TV/film that I have never seen done in exactly that way before, and executes it with finesse and to great emotional and thematic effect. That episode, directed by Lyonne herself, is one of the most perfect pieces of TV direction I’ve ever seen.
I might just go back and rewatch the entire thing from the beginning. It’s a marvel.
The entire creative team was female, and it’s amazing how different that makes the whole show feel from almost every other TV show I’ve seen. It really highlights how few women are TV creators and showrunners. I’m not talking about any "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus“ bullshit, but how many both big and little moments involve the lived experience of being a woman in America in a way I just don’t normally see. (It doesn't help that many male creators seem to believe that men are from Earth, and women are aliens from another dimension.)
There's a lot of diversity in terms of race, religion, and sexual orientation. I particularly enjoyed the parts that involved Judaism, which felt true to my own experience in a way that, again, I have never seen on TV before.
If anyone’s already seen Russian Doll, or sees it later, let me know and I’ll put up a spoiler post so we can talk about it.
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If it were on AO3, would it have any content warnings? Gore, rape, animal death?
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What part of the main plot is aggressively to your dislike?
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https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2251930.html
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I've been on the fence about this one, but you've won me over. (And, after all, if it's just four hours total...)
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It kept me glued enough to get me past my strong somatic reaction to all that smoking (I also get it when I hear jazz), though I faltered around ep 7 or so, thinking it was going way more toward horror than I like.
I thought the writing was super tight, and the characters interestingly complex. I don't know that the ending sequence worked for me, though I liked the actual ending--not the images, too grunge for me, but the music. The music overall jacked up the intensity so much and wove in so well that I sometimes had to go back and rewatch a bit to see how sound and image bonded.
Anyway I dreamed a film (that is, a cinematic argument: I knew I was watching this film, and knew it was in response to the series) last night, which was an argument about how it almost, but didn't work, which I found interesting on waking up.
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What was your dream film?
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The frame was that it was a film about baseball. But there was a stated apologia that there was little baseball in it, so underneath that was a lucid-dream awareness that this was an argument about Russian Doll. In other words, my brain saying that yes, it was this one thing, but it was really another thing not quite working in that frame.
No use in going over the details of the dream, which will make even less sense than the above. And I'm already forgetting a lot of them, but the crux of it was the use of the kids, specifically little Lucy, who never became an actual person after we met her, unlike all the other characters. She was never more than a doll, (in the dream, an actual doll); aside from the dream, I felt the story lost control when Ruth didn't react after blood splattered her face. And when she turned into the little ghost Nadia. She never took on any life. the glass shard was cool, but the story shook again when Nadia didn't process that before the whole ending sequence (which I thought was really good, especially the way Gingerbread Man was worked in, and counterbalancing that, the homeless man, who seemed to be serving as the Wandering Jew/holy fool figure).
Probably none of that makes sense anywhere outside my head, but there it is.
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I may be so sick that I end up off for the rest of fhe week. Sadly. The only upside to that might be the hope of havng something this intriguing to binge watch while feeling like crap.
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So far the thing that's standing out for me the most is how well it portrays gendered microaggressions and womens' baseline hypervigilance. I'm not sure where it's going with them yet, thematically, but I'm really impressed by how well it manages to capture the just-barely-deniable threat in scenes like the ambulance ride and the code review meeting without resorting to ominous music or flashy camera work.
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https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/2251930.html