I’m a teacher and ended up with an unusual situation. My own kids have school while I received another cold/snow day. I had zero expectation for this one, so I had…zero plans.
I’ve been watching a new show that hit Netflix today called Russian Dolls.
It’s like Groundhog Day. Or even more, it’s like Happy Deathday. Lady dies, repeats the same day over and over. It’s only 25 minutes long per episode, by the way.
I’ll go full open spoilers in the next post, but would love to hear others thoughts as(or after) you watch.
I finished watching it yesterday. Ultimately, I thought it was a longer, less funny version of “Groundhog Day”.
It was interesting in parts, but I think it was only partially successful at having a greater emotional or dramatic depth. Maybe it would have had more impact if I had grown up with serious mother issues or something.
I just finished watching it, I loved it. I thought it was really funny, Nadia had a lot of great lines, Max was funny, and some of the visual things were funny, like when Nadia repeatedly fell into the open basement doors. The editing was also really great, with the knocking of each reset, and that changing as it went, and the music cues in the episode.
Natasha Lyonne was great as Nadia, both hilarious and emotional. I’ve never seen the actor who played Alan before, he was very good and I can imagine him being big in the future. Also Netflix seems to have learned from some previous series, this one was the perfect length of time, enough to get into weirdness but didn’t drag it out too long.
It’s definitely not standing out in my mind much a few days later.
I hated Nadia the first 3 episodes. Thing is, Bill Murray’s character in Groundhog Day was supposed to be hated, but they set his character up in a way where we hated him, but enjoyed watching his journey through the experience.
The show would have done better to star with Alan and watch him get comfortable with his routine. Then, he meets Nadia and her strong-willed personality pushes them to solve the problem.
The dialogue and symbolism is clever enough to be entertaining, if at no point subtle (God, Schrödinger’s Cat, goldfish bowls, “the illusion of free will”, the video game, various minor characters’ rants, etc); arguably not clever-clever, and by no means original. But the number and length of episodes are short enough that it’s easy to watch without having it drag out (or are there supposed to be multiple seasons?)
It did make me wonder who came up with the original Groundhog Day concept. The earliest that pops into mind is Nietzsche, but does it go as far back as classical philosophy?
The movie “Edge of Tomorrow” showed that it was possible to put an interesting twist on the “rebooting” idea. But I thought “Russian Doll” suffered a bit from being so similar to “Groundhog Day”. If someone told me there was a director’s cut of “Groundhog Day” with 10 minutes of comedy removed and 70 minutes of dramatic scenes added, I’m not sure I’d rush out to see it.
By the way, I thought there were some very funny scenes, especially the physical comedy (like walking down stairs). But pacing seemed a bit weird when mixed with all of the more serious plot.
I just watched all 8 episodes. What struck me was how did all these people afford such large, nice apartments in New York City? Thats probably the wrong lesson, but it reminds me of something I heard about home alone. You know you’re an adult when you watch home alone and you keep trying to figure out what Kevin McCalister’s dad did to afford such a large house.
This show got much better in the middle and final episodes. I also noticed at least 3 actors from orange is the new black are in this.
In the last week I’ve watched Groundhog Day, Happy Death Day, and now all of Russian Doll, three similar yet quite different shows.
At least Happy Death Day acknowledged Groundhog Day, and though the AV Club article referenced above talks about it, Russian Doll must be in a different universe than the rest of us, since whether intentionally or not, no one in Russian Doll is aware of the other movies.
I really like Natasha Lyonne; I think that on re-viewing of American Pie that she’s the best part of that movie (well, maybe the second best part). Her character her is just as smart assed, smoking and drugging up like there’s no tomorrow and like no one cares. That’s the whole point of the series: no one cared for either of the two repeating characters, and they need to find lives where someone does care for them.
The music throughout was interesting, and Lyonne has a nice comic flair. For much of the timeI thought she was doing a Pamela Adlon impression. Like others have said, the first few episodes with just her doing all of the dying were pretty raw, and only when Allen shows up in episode 3 do the rough edges calm down a bit. By the end it captivated me enough to look forward to a second season.
While the Groundhog Day influence is obvious, to me it most of felt much more like an extended Black Mirror bit. Their programming and games references were pretty solid even to her explicit stating that this is a bug in the code.
Strongly disagree that “no one cared for either of the two repeating characters” - others cared deeply for each of them. They each though had aspects that were pushing others away, her more intentionally than him.
Her voice mannerisms as Nadia had me thinking of Peter Falk more than anyone else though! Was I alone in hearing that?
I just watched it. Like others I thought it got much more interesting when Alan showed up.
At first I found Nadia and her friends irritating and was actually on the verge of giving up and finding something else to watch, and then Alan showed up at the end of episode 3 (or was it 4?). That’s when it started to get interesting.
It sounds like there’s a good chance of there being more episodes.
And, when it came down to it, was willing to play her own game.