Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Russian Doll’ On Netflix, Where Natasha Lyonne Keeps Reliving Her Birthday Over And Over

Groundhog Day has been imitated over and over in the quarter-century since it was released, with people living the same day over and over until they learn to live a better life. But Russian Doll, Natasha Lyonne and Amy Poehler’s new Netflix comedy, tweaks that formula a bit, with the person who’s caught in this purgatory not learning to be a better person, but just trying to live with herself as is and find out just what the heck is happening to her. Read on for more…

RUSSIAN DOLL: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A woman with a mop of curly red hair stares into the mirror in a dark bathroom. We then follow her out the vagina-shaped door and into her own birthday party.

The Gist: Nadia Volvokov (Natasha Lyonne) is at the apartment of her friends Maxine (Greta Lee) and Lizzy (Rebecca Henderson), celebrating her 36th birthday. It’s a big one for her, because her mother never made it that far. She’s enjoying the party, smoking joints laced with cocaine, and she meets an over-talky guy at the party. He goes home with her and they have sex.

Nadia, though, has other things on her mind. She’s a software engineer who used to work for a video game company, so she tends to lose herself in her code when she’s not socializing and getting drunk/high. She’s also trying to distance herself from her ex John (Yul Vazquez), who wants to get back together. On top of anything else, her cat Oatmeal has gone missing. After dismissing the talky guy, she goes out again, and sees Oatmeal across the street; as she’s running to get him, though, she’s hit by a car and lands hard on the pavement…

She then finds herself back in the bathroom at her party. It’s at that point that she realizes that she died when she was hit by the car and is living the night over again. She talks about things that will happen, to the wonderment of her friends. She skips going home with the talky guy and hangs out with John and her aunt Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley), and then finds Oatmeal when she leaves. She sits on a railing by the river, petting him, and he disappears. She then falls in the water… and finds herself back at the party.

Our Take: Russian Doll is an interesting show, and not just because Lyonne’s character Nadia is living the same night over and over. Created and written by Lyonne, Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland, the show starts a bit inauspiciously, establishing Nadia as over-intellectual, able to out-reason the talky college professor she sleeps with, giving him overcomplicated explanations about why she owns a cat but is not a cat person. Yes, we get that she’s her own person and likes it that way. But for the first ten minutes of the show we were wondering if the entire series would be this way.

Then Nadia gets hit by a car and everything changes. We knew about the Groundhog Day-esque conceit, so that didn’t surprise us. But what happened was the writing got out of its own way once Nadia found herself back at the party and realized what had happened. We’re given clues that this isn’t the first time she’s died that night, but this is the first time she’s aware of what’s going on. And Lyonne’s performance amps up from there; she starts to get frantic, but is still under control, making wisecracks and putting people in their place, and Lyonne balances that well.

And since we weren’t sure how this concept was going to play out over a season, we watched the first three episodes. And there, we found out that Nadia isn’t necessarily taking a journey to being a better person, or improving the lives of those around her. She just wants to know what the hell is going on and get as far as she can without dying. So we sometimes get days out from the party before something happens, and sometimes we only see a few minutes before she dies. It’s that flexibility that makes the show fresh, and gives Lyonne more to do as she tries to figure out her life and why she can’t just die in peace — and that she may not be the only one experiencing this.

Sex and Skin: We hear about more sex than we actually see, mostly the talky professor pontificating about anal play.

Parting Shot: After dying a second time, Nadia is frantic. She exits the party, says to herself, “Be careful,” and walks home.

Sleeper Star: Everyone on the show is great, so we’ll give this to Lyonne’s makeup and wardrobe. Nadia’s mop of hair, her power eyeliner, her early-’90s shoulder-pad festooned jackets… they all show how confident Nadia is in herself and how she’s interacting with the world around her.

Most Pilot-y Line: It’s a funny line, but when Nadia says, “It’s my bad attitude that keeps me young” after giving a monologue about Oatmeal’s need to be free, we were ready to write the show off.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Russian Doll takes a well-worn premise and refreshes it, and Lyonne puts on the performance of her career in this funny, emotional series.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company’s Co.Create and elsewhere.

Stream Russian Doll on Netflix