If Americans have learned anything about Ukrainian president Vlodomyr Zelensky in the weeks since Russia invaded his country, it’s that he’s a masterful media strategist. In trolling Russian president Vladimir Putin (“I don’t bite,” Zelensky said when suggesting negotiations, referencing Putin’s habit of sitting at the other end of long tables), as in mobilizing world opinion behind Ukraine, his prior experience as an actor and comedian has served him well.
Which is why this is a perfect time for western audiences to familiarize themselves with Zelensky’s Servant of the People — one of the most intriguing and historically important shows you could possibly watch right now. And you should watch, as much and as fast as you can — despite a bizarre number of obstacles in accessing the whole thing.
This is the TV show that ran in Ukraine for three seasons (plus a movie) from 2015 to 2018. Zelensky’s character is a history teacher who is unexpectedly elected president in a landslide after his students post a viral video of him complaining about corruption and crowdfund his campaign online. Life imitated art when Zelensky started a Servant of the People Party, ran for president in a campaign run almost entirely on social media, and won in a landslide.
It may not explain why Russia started this war as well as, say, The Death of Stalin (in which we see a megalomaniacal Russian leader and his cowed underlings who can’t even trust each other, let alone deliver bad news). Still, for outsiders, Servant of the People is something of a lesson in Ukrainian politics and culture, and yet the 24-minute episodes are easy to binge. The humor, a handful of references aside, is universal.
This is satire of the fast-moving, widely-accessible kind. The show consistently tells the terrible truth about real-life villains — the billionaire oligarchs who stop any government working for the people — in a way only the court jester of a hopeful democracy can.
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Zelensky emerges from the show less a buffoon, more a heartfelt true believer in democracy. The nearest American analogue might be Jimmy Stewart in the classic Frank Capra movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, another great advertisement for democratic principles in dark times. In both stories a somewhat naive history-lover is elevated to high office, refuses to bow to corruption, suffers outrageous smears from the corrupt, and holds the line of morality with from-the-hip speeches.
Servant of the People gives Mr. Smith a humor upgrade by way of Veep, with a little Walter Mitty-style daydreaming (Zelensky’s character, Vasily Petrovich Goloborodko, often finds himself talking to historical figures in his head). I also saw scenes and setups that reminded me of The Office, Parks and Rec, The Great, The Thick of It, Yes Prime Minister, Arrested Development, and if you’re chomping at the bit to watch it all after that name-checking, you’re my kind of people.
How to watch: with difficulty
But therein lies the trouble: Watching it all. After tracking down the world’s most wondered-about show, the best I can suggest is that you time-travel back a couple of years and convince yourself to watch it on Netflix in its entirety before it vanishes from the streaming service for still-unexplained reasons. Search for it on Netflix now and you’ll get redirected to Winter on Fire, the documentary on the 2014 protests that forced Ukraine’s pro-Putin, police-state-loving president Viktor Yanukovych to flee the country (which is well worth your time, but not exactly the same thing.)
If you’re in the UK, Servant of the People is now screening on Channel 4 — but at a painfully slow rate. Currently, just three episodes out of the 24 in season 1 are available on the UK-only All 4 streaming app. (Which is also pretty much what’s available on torrenting services; not that you’d ever check such things, of course.) The company that owns TV rights has been doing brisk sales, according to multiple reports, but will not reveal if there’s a U.S. taker yet. Given the amount of disinformation about Zelensky rife in certain dark corners of American politics — Rep. Madison Cawthorn was just caught on video calling Ukraine’s leader a “thug” — the show that proves the Putin apologists wrong can’t come to U.S. screens soon enough.
For now, would-be Servant of the People viewers are left with YouTube, where there is good and bad news. Good news: Zelensky’s own production company has uploaded every episode, so we’re talking high-quality transfers, not bad user rips. Bad news for English speakers: Most of the episodes offer only Russian subtitles. (Conversely, this is good news for anti-Putin forces in Russia, where the show was already popular, YouTube still isn’t banned, and Zelensky’s heroism needs to be kept top of mind.) Some of the episodes with English subtitles are more comprehensible than others. If YouTube wanted to do some good in the world, and thank Zelensky for the millions of ad impressions he’s brought to the online video giant, it could sink some money into a full-on worldwide Servant of the People translation project.
In the meantime, here’s a quick guide to the best Servant of the People viewing experience currently possible.
Episodes 1 and 2
The double-length premiere is a great place to start. Servant of the People wisely skips over the whole election part, dropping us into the story the morning that history teacher Vasily Petrovich Goloborodko (who lives with his family) learns his campaign for the president was successful. He’s then ushered through a dizzying round of interviews and makeovers by the prime minister, Yuri Ivanovich Chuiko, whose silky smoothness you would be right to distrust. The story of the viral video and the crowdfunding that kickstarted his campaign is told in flashback. And the shadowy oligarchs we’ll come to know later in the show are anonymous, their faces always covered by items of furniture as they plot nefarious schemes.
And here, in all its glory, is the joke that was cut when the show aired in Russia. Vasily is offered a range of expensive watches, and is told which one Putin favors. “Putin Hublot?” he says innocently — a phrase that sounds a lot like “Putin khuilo,” a Ukrainian football chant that translates roughly to “Putin is a dickhead.”
Episode 3
Episode 3 focuses on Vasily’s family; in an early sign of the corruption that will surround him everywhere he goes, his mother, father, niece and sister are seen promising government positions to their friends and receiving “100 percent discounts” at their favorite stores. (A shopping trip is in order after the family fears it won’t be able to dress as elegantly as Michelle Obama, who is said to be attending the inauguration.) The fourth wall shatters when a couple of policemen ask the family if they can “do something about” comedians who criticize the government.
Episode 4
Episode 4 opens with what is hands-down my favorite scene of the show: Vasily being shown around his swanky new presidential residence. He finds a chandelier so expensive that it caused the country to default on its debt during the 2008 financial crisis, and a parrot that squawks “no, you’re the idiot!” when it hears the name of ousted pro-Putin president Viktor Yanukovych; the show was actually filmed on the massive estate Yanukovych had vacated in a hurry less than two years earlier. Unfortunately the episode is the first to lose its English subtitles before the end, so if you want to see Zelensky’s character chatting about his inauguration address with Abraham Lincoln, you’ll need to watch this version.
Episode 5
Episode 5 may be my favorite episode overall — and certainly the show’s best example of physical comedy. In the first half, Vasily spends much of his time running away from his ridiculously large security detail. In the second, we’re introduced to his presidential predecessor, who has barricaded himself into his office with a shotgun and a bar full of booze. Much of the show hits differently now Russia has invaded Ukraine, but this is the first scene that hits differently in the wake of Donald Trump’s disastrous bid to cling on to power.
The quality of the English translation starts to go downhill with episode 6, in which Vasily falls out with his family, yells “Putin has been overthrown” to get the attention of squabbling deputies, and has a chat with Che Guevara. Subtitles then disappear early in episode 7. In episode 8, the show takes a turn towards screwball office comedy, as Vasily brings in a cabinet of outsiders like himself — only they all happen to be his old school pals. The show presents them as a cadre of trusted allies who are less likely to take bribes, but it’s hard for a viewer not to notice that such nepotism is a form of corruption in itself. In episodes 9 and 10, the oligarchs take a number of steps to bribe or bring down the new cabinet, including dosing one member with psychedelics.
As promising a plotline as that may be, we’re lost without English subtitles for the next 13 episodes. (You can try auto-translating the Russian captions, but good luck with that.) Which brings us to the last and most epic English language experience in the current canon:
Servant of the People 2: The Movie
After Season 1 was a huge hit, Zelensky and company repackaged a planned plotline from Season 2 as a (mercifully well-subtitled) 90-minute movie, Servant of the People 2. Here you’ll encounter mild spoilers; Yuri Ivanovich, the prime minister, is in jail, having been unmasked as a stooge of the oligarchs, and Vasily is dating an assistant who is also revealed to be one of their people.
To break up an alliance of the three most powerful oligarchs, Vasily and Yuri take a train to the east of the country (including, chillingly, several cities that are currently under heavy Russian bombardment). Classic road movie farce ensues. Meanwhile Ukraine has applied for a loan from the International Monetary Fund, which keeps piling on the onerous conditions even as Vasily’s hapless foreign minister tries to keep the IMF leadership drunk.
Vasily’s speech at the end of the movie responding to the IMF loan offer is a thing of beauty, and in retrospect can be applied to any situation where Ukraine has been pushed too far. “We’re not a border region between orcs and elves,” Vasily says. “We are a nation of open, clever and talented people. When we understand this, when we understand that stealing is bad, that we need to roll up our sleeves and work hard … Then the whole world will say ‘glory to Ukraine!'” Slava Ukraini indeed.
