Servant of the People | ★★★☆☆
All4.com

If every Jew had a sitcom that became reality, I’d write one about a man who miraculously loses two stone and his hair grows back, but alas it seems to only work for the most exceptional amongst us, of which Volodymyr Zelensky has amply shown himself to be these last weeks in response to his country’s invasion by Russia. 

Servant of the People tells the story of a history teacher whose off-the-cuff expletive ridden rant regarding the corrupt state of Ukrainian politics goes viral, resulting in his being voted in as President. The first episode, airing in the UK on Channel 4, sets everything up, in this case using flashbacks, but as the series progresses it becomes part farce about politics in an emerging democracy, and part exploration as to whether it’s individuals or the entire system that are corrupt, and regardless, can they be resisted?

Obviously the show resonated with Ukrainians, for whilst Zelensky’s fictional creation only received 67% of the vote, a few years later, real Zelensky managed to get 73%. Thus making this the only ever TV show that had to end because it became true. If Russia hadn’t invaded, perhaps the next step would be a sitcom about a sitcom that became true, but then Larry David might sue for plagiarism.

 First airing in 2015, the first two seasons are each made up of 24 episodes, so it’s a fair commitment if you want to go all in, and I’d be surprised if many Western audiences would stick with it that far. Where it works better is as a curio, shining light and providing insight into a country that now finds itself the focal point of global affairs.

We tend to consider art in its context, and as the context changes so too does the art. So what started as a comedy, is now a heartbreaking testimonial to Ukraine as it was. It may not’ve been perfect, where is, but through the title sequence and locations and characters, you get to see it as something far closer to our society than we might’ve thought, a reality now being dragged ever further away by despotism.

Screenshot 2022-03-07 at 14.06.10

Volodymr Zelensky stars as the fictional president of Ukraine in Servant of the People (Credit Kvartal 95)

In its original outing as a comedy though, it’s less impactful. Obviously a huge amount of the jokes are going to be lost in translation. A pun about Putin in the first episode makes no sense in subtitles, but was enough to immediately get the series pulled from Russian television. And let’s be real, like the big baddies of the series, the mysterious richest men in Ukraine trying to pull the strings yet somehow lacking the funds to upgrade to smartphones, there’s a lag.

The soundtrack is cheeseball cheesy, the surprises necessary to elicit laughter are few and far between, and Zelensky himself seems to perform in only two modes; bewildered put-upon wacky ‘comedy’ actor, bad, or sincere ‘natural' actor, good. Continual flipping back and firth between the two can be a bit jaunting. Yet that doesn’t diminish the Zelensky that now stares out from our screens as the figurehead of a country’s resistance against tyranny. In this setting there’s only one role he embodies, hero.