Servant of the People TV review: 'A heartbreaking testimony to Ukraine as it once was'

 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.