My wife and I have slowly been watching Servant of the People on Netflix for the past several weeks, and I am a little surprised that it isn’t being talked about more, especially here. For the few who may not have heard of it, it is a political sitcom starring Volodymyr Zelenskyy that ran from 2015 until 2019. IMDb says there were three seasons, but Netflix only has the first season (23 episodes). We are up to episode 5.
Naturally, it was curiosity that made us begin watching it. (We also watched Paddington Bear, even though Zelenskyy only voiced Paddington in the Ukrainian-dubbed version.) The first episode was good enough that we decided to continue watching it. For a sitcom the plot is actually pretty good: a high school history teacher, Vasiliy Goloborodko, goes off on an after-hours rant about Ukrainian politics and politicians, and one of his students surreptitiously captures the rant on video and posts it online. The video goes viral, the students tell him that he really should run for President, and they kickstart a crowd-source campaign funding effort so that their teacher can register as an actual candidate. Goloborodko ends up winning the election for President of Ukraine (against the wishes of some oligarchs who had previously been running things from the shadows). The stage is now set for the adventures of an honest but ordinary guy thrust into the national spotlight.
The dialogue is in Ukrainian, with English subtitles, so it isn’t easy to watch, but it is well worth the effort. First, because it is genuinely funny; second, because (like so much good comedy) it feeds that “if only” fantasy that we all have about what could happen if a decent person found himself in charge of a historically corrupt and patronage-riddled system.
I won’t give away any spoilers (except for the moment when President Goloborodko breaks up a literal fight among several members of Parliament by loudly saying “Putin has been deposed!” to get their attention), but I will say that by the third episode I found myself thinking that this TV show was a carefully-planned set-up for Zelenskyy’s run for the Ukrainian Presidency. It seemed impossible to believe that it was merely a television comedy that just happened to foreshadow Zelenskyy’s rise to the office in real life. Yet from everything I have read on this question, Zelenskyy was reluctant to run for President, and the show really was just a comedian’s fantasy. Whatever, it is a very good fantasy, and well worth watching. The fictional “Mr. Everyman” has turned out in real life to be more like Mr. Churchill than Mr. Smith (from Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939), starring James Stewart).
As for the real-life war, I only wish that Putin could one day be put on trial not for war crimes, but for the crime of committing war. But that is a different essay.