It seems a very amazing story. This story tells about a young woman from New York City being caught in a mysterious loop and maybe it's a comedy. Again and again the same woman finds herself attending the same party and dying at the end of the night, only to wake up the next day without being hurt. It seems funny but it carries more mysterious events in the life of that woman.
As the series proceeds, it gets more ambitious and more complicated in a way that's gratifying to watch. It's still anchored, though, by its sense of place and time, and by the infinite possibilities that a night walking around New York City presents.
Russian Doll takes a trope we know and expands it with character, depravity, and flat-out good writing. There's also the mystery of: Is Nadia alive or has she become Schrödinger's It-Girl?
As terrific as the story and performances are, perhaps the most remarkable thing about Russian Doll is the amazing balance of tone, in which humour, horror, love and inky emotional blackness supply each other with revolving counterweights.
The construction of Russian Doll isn't always perfect, but as one of the themes of the series is the fallibility of the human psyche, those imperfections end up working, in a kind of scrappy way, in the show's favor.
One thing is certain - this is the overdue showcase for Lyonne that anyone who digs her and is familiar with her troubled personal history hoped for but never saw coming.
