Russian Doll (Netflix 2019)

One of the best TV series of recent years, arguably the Buffy for the Trump era, Russian Doll is about choices, loneliness, and exploring what it is to be human. Sort of. To be honest, I'm not entirely sure, but I do know that this comedy-drama manages to achieve a great deal in eight short episodes. For a start, it's very funny. It is also strange, falling into the general realm of the weird, fantastic, and to some extent the Gothic. While not exactly supernatural in the familiar sense, it hints strongly that there may be some higher purpose to what happens.

The story begins with Nadia Vulvokov's thirty-sixth birthday party. Nadia is in the bathroom, looking into the mirror. Someone is knocking at the door. Nadia goes out and greets various guests, and then her friend Max, whose is actually throwing the party for Nadia in her New York apartment. Max gives Nadia a joint laced with cocaine. Later, after making some questionable choices, Nadia is hit by a taxi, dies, and finds herself back in Max's bathroom. Someone is knocking at the door. Her life has been reset.



Natasha Lyonne's Nadia drinks, smokes, swears (a lot), takes illegal drugs, and is extremely funny. A very intelligent game designer, she seems to need no one in her life, other than her cat, Oatmeal. When we meet Nadia, Oatmeal has been missing for a few days. Cats have significance in quantum theory, and this is underlined in the first episode when Nadia finds Oatmeal only to have him literally vanish from her arms.



Is Nadia in Hell, or Purgatory? The fact that she is one year older than Dante was when he began his ordeal struck me as interesting. Seemingly small details like this abound, as when a homeless man called Horse claims to have invented the dark web, and insists on cutting Nadia's hair. And then there's the quite shocking assault on a roast chicken, one of many scenes that manage to be dramatically sound and ludicrous, like so much of real life.

While the idea of a time loop is not new, I don't think it has never been used so well before. Nadia's quest to find out why she is being tormented with repeated deaths leads her into some dark corners.  There is a tinge of horror to much of the humour, especially as details of Nadia's childhood are revealed. The characters she encounters are always believable - disturbingly so, in many cases - and there is enough going on here to generate at least one more season.