‘Russian Doll’ Season 2 Tears Itself (and Season 1’s Pitch-Perfect Ending) Apart In Search of Something New: TV Review
13.04.2022 - 10:21
/ variety.com
Caroline Framke Chief TV CriticIn its first incarnation, “Russian Doll” felt as close to complete as any TV show ever gets. With those first eight episodes, delving deep into the minds of jaded New Yorkers Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) and Alan (Charlie Barnett) and back out again, creators Lyonne, Amy Poehler, and Leslye Headland had achieved something truly heady, unnerving, and spectacular.
It’s rare for a show half as ambitious, or willing to throw itself at the wall over and over again to see if it sticks, to find a way to satisfactorily wrap itself up. But this one did, in a finale as unforgettable as it was triumphant.
And yet three years later, here comes a Season 2 for a show that once felt as perfectly contained a miracle as TV ever gets. Why should the show go back and mess with a story that already felt so complete? That very question, as it turns out, lies at the heart of the improbable second season of “Russian Doll,” premiering April 20.
It’s hard to talk about it without revealing even a hint of the spoilers that Netflix has deemed verboten, but for Nadia and Alan, I’ll do my best.After the first season depicted a brutal kind of limbo in which Nadia and Alan can’t stop dying and coming back to life on her 36th birthday, the second opens a few weeks shy of her 40th. Materially, not much seems to have changed: Nadia is still chain-smoking her way around the East Village; Maxine (Greta Lee) is still the art of daytime eye makeup; Alan is still adhering to a strict schedule, albeit this time with a steady stream of blind dates.
Even Horse (Brendon Sexton III), the Tompkins Square resident who once haunted Nadia’s many deaths, continues to linger around the periphery of her life. But Nadia’s godmother Ruth
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