When images of the Ukrainian comedian-turned-President Volodymyr Zelensky, clad in combat green clothing and issuing heroic calls for resistance from a bunker, began to spread across the world, some people on Twitter joked that this was the moment in a movie where, following the trope, we should get a freeze frame. After opening in media res on a scene of surreal pandemonium in the makeshift secret presidential war command bunker, the screen would freeze and Zelensky, who once pretended to play a piano with his penis on television, would break the fourth wall, turn to the camera, and say something like, “You may be wondering how I got here.”
How did Zelensky, a former contestant on Ukraine’s Dancing with the Stars (he won in 2006) and the Ukrainian voice of Paddington Bear, go from a popular regional entertainer to one of the world’s most pivotal heads of state? Already well known in Ukraine as a humorist and rom-com actor, Zelensky created and starred in a satirical 2015 television series called Servant of the People in which he played a sympathetic everyman who accidentally becomes president. The show’s message proved so popular in Ukraine (generally considered Europe’s poorest country and one of its most corrupt) that in 2019, Zelensky actually ran for president. Campaigning as a populist protest candidate who was anti-corruption, pro-European, and in favor of reconciliation between Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking Ukrainians, he won in a landslide runoff. He was in his third year in office when Putin invaded.
The Russian-language show that made Zelensky president ran for three seasons on Ukrainian television and also appeared on Netflix and other foreign platforms, though Netflix’s rights have since lapsed. (One imagines that someone at Netflix headquarters is frantically trying to renew them right now.) Fortunately, however, the entire series is on YouTube. The English subtitles aren’t great. They have a tendency to disappear for 10- or 20-minute stretches. But with some help from YouTube’s astonishing auto-translate feature, I was able to watch the first season.
Servant of the People is somewhere between Veep and Yes Minister, with a dash of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Zelensky plays Vasily Goloborodko, a divorced high school history teacher who lives with his parents. Goloborodko is a broke and frustrated schlub. His salary as a teacher is so low that he has to take a bank loan to buy a microwave. But his slightly embittered exterior conceals an earnest idealist. One day at school, he explodes, uncharacteristically, in a profanity-laced rant about corruption. His students surreptitiously film the diatribe, and it goes viral online. Goloborodko awakes one morning to discover that he has been elected president.
The canny and jaded prime minister, Yuri Chuiko (Stanislav Boklan), arrives to escort Goloborodko to the seat of government, where he is put through a rapid-fire, My Fair Lady-style presidential makeover and crash course, which also sends up the inefficiency and corruption of the Ukrainian government. “Do you remember the 2008 default?” an aide asks, as they walk past a massive gold chandelier. “Here it is.” Goloborodko is baffled by the cavalier atmosphere. Someone hands him a draft speech that turns out to be the plagiarized Gettysburg Address, and a massive motorcade speeds by to take a Cabinet minister’s wife to her hairdresser. He decides on principle to forgo the perks, including by continuing to live with his parents.
Goloborodko soon learns that his ambitions for reform will not be easily achieved in a country where casual corruption is the norm. A cabal of oligarchs plots behind the scenes to protect the status quo. (Among other things, the oligarchs are appalled by his proposal that the government actually collect taxes.) Goloborodko also has to restrain his own family, who are excited to discover that they no longer have to pay traffic tickets or for, well, anything, since people start giving them stuff for free. When he confronts his pushy sister Svetlana (Ekaterina Kisten, a Ukrainian answer to Jane Lynch) about her attempts to milk the system, she says, “Why can’t we live like normal people for once?” He responds, “You know there are 45 million ‘normal people,’ right?”
The other thorny challenge is forming his administration. In an effort to thwart corruption, Goloborodko tries to interview only the most qualified people but realizes that they’re also corrupt, just more sophisticated at it. He and his ex-wife Olga (Elena Kravets), who is venting about her dating life as a single mother, have a hilarious conversation talking past each other. “If a person is honest, he is a fool,” Goloborodko complains. “If a person is smart, he is a thief.” She nods. “If he is divorced, a pervert.”
Puzzled by the dilemma, Goloborodko considers appointing only Georgians and Armenians, who are considered less corrupt by virtue of being outsiders. But he feels this is unpatriotic. In the end, he settles on a kind of anti-corruption nepotism; he makes his ex-wife, who works at a bank, the minister of finance, his boorish but dependable childhood friend Sergey (Evgeniy Koshevoy) the minister of foreign affairs, and so on, in the belief that he is better off surrounded by commonsensical salt-of-the-earth types he can trust. When he can’t find any honest lawyers to adjudicate an important financial case, he appoints an Orthodox priest as judge. (The priest reads his verdict in an ecclesiastical chant.) The oligarchs, meanwhile, scheme to undermine him. They try to dig up kompromat on him. But they fail because he’s such a square. They try to bribe his ministers, a test they pass.
Goloborodko must also contend with the rowdy Ukrainian Parliament. Entering the chamber to find legislators mid-brawl, he shouts “Putin is dead!” to get their attention. He struggles with efforts to rally the Ukrainian people, who often like the idea of reform more than the practice. Voters are particularly incensed when, in an effort to patch a pit in the national budget, he raises taxes on alcohol. Periodically during the show, in dream sequences and hallucinations, he is visited by historical figures — Plutarch, Abraham Lincoln, Louis XVI — who argue with him about how to govern.
Zelensky is the kind of natural comic actor who understands the importance of a straight man for the zany foils to bounce off. And when the show occasionally breaks into more earnest, Aaron Sorkin-style monologues, you can sort of see how a Ukrainian voter, watching the show, might decide to throw his eggs in Zelensky’s basket.
Despite how much of the humor is doubtlessly lost in translation, I found Servant of the People funny, jaunty entertainment, with slapstick physical gags to supplement the clever dialogue. It’s sometimes painfully on the nose: In one scene, oligarchs gamble over a game of Monopoly, with the game board revealed to be a map of Ukraine. And the series’s length (24 episodes) can be a slog, especially when you’re receiving the dialogue through subtitles.
To watch Servant of the People now, knowing that the happy, bustling Kyiv of the show is covered in sandbags and Ukrainians are being murdered by Russian bombs is to experience the sitcom with a dark and sometimes surreal edge. In one scene, Zelensky receives a phone call from Angela Merkel telling him that Ukraine has been accepted to the European Union. He’s ecstatic, until she apologizes and says she meant to call Montenegro. You can feel, under the moment’s laughs, the very real humiliation.
In another scene, Goloborodko/Zelensky assigns a challenging task to one of his civil servants, who responds, “Are you joking?” “Do I look like a comedian?” Zelensky replies.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
