Die, relive, repeat

After slagging off Netflix in my previous column for being unimaginative in its operations, it might be a little rich of me to wax eloquent about a new show on the streaming platform. Nevertheless, my profession demands I bring it to my readers’ notice whenever I stumble upon something as scintillating as this show about a woman who dies on the night of her 36th birthday party only to relive the same night in an infinite loop. 

Natasha Lyonne brings blistering energy as the freewheeling Manhattan-based Russian Jew, Nadia Vulvokov, who keeps dying in richly imagined ways only to re-appear in a washroom every single time. She tries to reverse-engineer her fateful night by asking the dramatis personae present at the party about every single detail they can recollect. This includes her best friends, Maxine (a screamingly funny Greta Lee) and Libby (Rebecca Henderson), an Updike-quoting philandering English professor, Mike (Jeremy Lowell Bobb), the way-too-caring ex-boyfriend, John (Yul Vazquez), a genial bodega owner, Ferran (Ritesh Rajan).

Lyonne, who co-wrote the show with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland, brings a whimsical charm to a plot that might be construed as a straight lift of Groundhog Day. While the cult Bill Murray-starrer is more a metaphor for the existential dread of a human who’s had enough of his daily life, Russian Doll is largely about Nadia re-calibrating her distant past and present while she keeps reliving the same night.

A still from Russian Doll

Midway through the series, Nadia discovers that Alan Zaveri (Charlie Barnett) is in the same situation as she is. As someone who dies on the night he was supposed to propose to his not-so-faithful girlfriend, Barnett brings an Everyman work ethic to his acting. Things get interesting when Nadia and Alan start to realise that their deaths coincided on the same night and they need to work in tandem to undo their messed-up situation.

Ever since Lena Dunham’s barnstorming HBO show, Girls, Brooklyn has been the preferred borough of modern-day American TV series to show the millennial experience in New York. Broad City, Search Party and High Maintenance followed suit and so did most of the American indie cinema, but Russian Doll is decidedly Manhattan. Last year, I had the good luck to roam around the most expensive real estate of North America, and I ended up wailing about how the borough’s extremely rich heritage is being hollowed out. Old bookstores, cinemas and cafés have been shutting down owing to insane rents and are being replaced by bank branches and unaffordable condos. One sight that struck me from the old residential buildings was the fire escapes that instantly reminded me of Audrey Hepburn’s sojourns in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I was ecstatic to see a lot of them in Russian Doll.

While trying to piece together her fateful night, Nadia finds herself going down the old synagogues of Manhattan. Russian Doll has boatloads of such old-school Manhattan references that future generations will find only in cinema and books. Apart from a brilliant plot, Russian Doll also has crackling dialogues.

Nadia: Do ladies have midlife crises?

Libby: Aren’t you a little young for a midlife crisis?

Nadia: I mean, I smoke, what? Two packs a day? I have the internal organs of a man twice my age. If I make it to my low 70s, I’ll be shocked.

When Alan tries to reason with Nadia about her moral conduct, all she says is, “With the amount of guilt, I’m surprised you’re not a Jew.”

Lyonne’s surly dialogue delivery is at its best when she’s talking down to Barnett’s earnest tone. They might already take away the award for the most awkward-yet-believable pairing of 2019.

Despite each of the eight episodes being under 30 minutes, Russian Doll tends to get lumbering with subplots involving Nadia ex-boyfriend’s daughter and a brief trip to the ‘90s when Nadia’s mom (Chloë Sevigny) goes cuckoo. That said, when it’s not dull, Russian Doll is terrific. Even when it’s not terrific, the dullness is mitigated by mesmerising cameos by rank unknowns, be it a philosophising rabbi or a woozy panhandler called Horse or a hypnotic cat called Oatmeal.

Don’t miss out on this crazy-good TV show.

jagan.520@gmail.com