RUSSIAN DOLL REVIEW: Groundhog Day all over again, again, and again!

Layer-upon-layer of dead good comedy from this new Netflix’s series. Natasha Lyonne is magnificent as a woman reliving her last 24 hours, Groundhog Day-style, in this endlessly impressive and idiosyncratic show

ABOVE: Natasha Lyonne in Russian Doll.                                 Photograph: Netflix

If you don’t mind a teensy spoiler, without which we can’t really discuss the series: The protagonist dies. This is not as big a surprise as it might seem.

And a party is the right place to meet Nadia. She’s a gregarious loner, warmly embracing her boho friends but allergic to any long-term attachment or dependence.

‘I’m sorry for YELLING,” yells the main character, Nadia, in Netflix’s new drama Russian Doll. “But I’m having a very BAD, NEVERENDING day.” And there, roughly, is the series’s premise.

After leaving her 36th birthday party in New York’s East Village to search for her missing cat, Nadia is killed by a car. She wakes up back at the party in a grandly overdecorated bathroom (all the better to mark the beginning of your new time loop, my dear), and starts all over again.

And again, Culturedemandsgeeks. Yes, it’s like Groundhog Day.

And the familiar premise is still fertile and compelling: what would you do? How would you cope if you were caught in a loop, doomed to spend eternity repeating your last few hours on Earth?

At first, Nadia doesn’t overthink things. “The universe,” she roars, after returning to the party a second time, “is trying to fuck with me, and I refuse to engage.” Nadia is a games coder played by Natasha Lyonne, an actor who specializes in characters who feel profound fury at the world; they are women with not one shit left to give.

Nadia is no exception.

The first half of Russian Doll is given over to the traditional testing of boundaries, working out how the strange new rules operate, divining the internal logic of the setup and eliminating the most obvious possibilities.

Nadia’s best friend Maxine (Greta Lee) – who is, incidentally, the decorator of the bathroom, and consumed with worry that it’s “too vaginal” – gives Nadia a cocaine-laced joint at the party, which she smokes just before her first death.

She assumes she is having a bad trip and tracks down its suppliers. It was not laced with cocaine, but with ketamine, they tell her. Nadia, who has tried most things once, is relieved. She has not tried ket, so it must be that. “Except we have done ket,” Maxine reminds her a few deaths later. “Most recently at Louis’s christening.”

If not drugs, then madness perhaps?

Nadia’s mother – who died younger than Nadia is now – had mental health problems, and at least that would be a known unknown.

But Nadia decides against a trip to Bellevue and heads instead to the local synagogue to investigate possible supernatural shenanigans, as the party venue is a converted Jewish school that might be flexing its mystic muscles.

ABOVE: Charlie Barnett, Greta Lee, and Rebecca Henderson in Russian Doll (2019)

Things get more complicated when Alan (Charlie Bennett) turns up – a man who is also experiencing time on a loop and quite enjoying the limited horizons it gives him; at least until he finds out how messy life can get even in 24 hours.

His girlfriend breaks up with him because she’s sleeping with someone else. Alan and Nadia join forces (he has little choice) and their delicately developing relationship gives the story heart.

While the second half of the series reveals more introspective and melancholy layers as we get towards its explanatory core.

This might seem to tell you everything about “Russian Doll” — another variation on “Groundhog Day,” premiering, wink wink, the day before Groundhog Day — the story is barely getting started. It’s the way the series twists and complicates the premise that makes it much more than a copycat.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

If you prefer to be totally surprised by your TV shows, put down this review and watch the show. It’s eight short, acerbic, wittily profound episodes with a richly satisfying ending(s). “Russian Doll” is lean and snappily paced; it even managed the rare feat, in the era of streaming-TV, of making us wish for an Oliver Twist approach, “Please sir, can I ave’ a little bit more?”

5/5 STARS