Yorkton This Week’s editorial staff takes readers on an explorative journey around the Internet, searching out the best in videos, podcasts, webcomics, music and anything else that catches their collective eyes which might interest our readers.
The challenge of Web Wanderings, at times, is that I feel as though the thing I’ve been hooked on isn’t particularly obscure or unique. Sometimes I’m doing a deep dive into some esoteric topic or unique entertainment experience. But, other times, the only thing I’ve been watching is the most recent TV series to get the front page of Netflix.
Russian Doll, then.
Cheekily debuting the day before Groundhog Day, the series starts at the same point as the Bill Murray film, with a character forced to relive the same day over and over again, in this case when she repeatedly dies at the end of the day, and then eventually get some sort of personal growth in the process. Starring and co-written by Natasha Lyonne - who created the series with Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland – the series starts as that same kind of cyclical comedy.
It doesn’t quite stay that way, getting increasingly ambitious and weird. Fruit gets moldy, people start disappearing, new characters show up to throw everything you know about the world in the trash and start again. It keeps you guessing in a way that never feels like it’s cheating.
Plus it has a sequence where Lyonne’s character falls down the stairs multiple times, which is both a memorably morbid slapstick sequence and a great way to set up a gag involving a rickety staircase.
It also has a fantastic soundtrack, from the Harry Nilsson track that opens every loop to ending the show with Love’s Alone Again Or, and every song in between, this thing just sounds good.
Weirdly, at the end, it reminded me of Charlie Chaplin most of all. His first silent films were merely okay, they didn’t get great until much later, when he began to make his character more sympathetic. That made the pratfalls mean something.
Lyonne and her co-creators do the same thing. The series gets stronger as it goes not because of the twists that it piles onto the story but because each of those twists makes her character more sympathetic. It’s funny when she falls down the stairs, but after that each death feels more disappointing, because you’re pulling for her, you want her to live and succeed, and the character grows a lot even as nobody else does.
Even as the show takes place over one day, it grows into something else entirely by the end of that day, and that makes it succeed.
