After the collapse of the Soviet Union, ordinary Russians had a craving for what they were denied in the Soviet era. Of course that was before Vladimir Putin restored the Evil Empire and Russia once again became isolated from the West.
But there were the good times when Russians could get fast food at McDonald’s, have a latte at Starbucks, or buy Air Jordans at a Nike outlet. These Western companies have shut down operations in Russia since sanctions were imposed after the invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24.
And in the early 2000s, there was a sitcom gap. Sitcoms were an unknown genre on Soviet-era state-run television, which was more inclined to sketch comedy and some improv competitions. In the 1990s, some American and British sitcoms—including reruns of I Love Lucy and Friends—were shown in their original versions, with Russian voiceovers.
But the first attempts by newly formed privately-owned Russian television stations to create original Russian sitcoms were commercial and critical failures due to the lack of money and creative talent, particularly writers to sustain a multi-episode show, according to Jeffrey Brassard, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta, who wrote a scholarly article on Russian sitcoms.
But the sitcom gap began to close in September 2004. That’s when the private STS television station broadcast the first episode of My Fair Nanny. after making a deal to do a Russian version of Fran Drescher’s Pygmailion-themed sitcom, The Nanny.
But there was nothing in Russian culture that quite matched Nanny Fran Fine, the nasal-voiced, street-smart, working-class Jewish-American woman from Queens.
Enter Nanna Vika, played by Russian actress, Anastasia Zavorotnyuk, who is of Ukrainian descent.
Viktoria “Vika” Prutkovskaya is a Ukrainian migrant living in the working-class Moscow suburb of Birulyova, who takes a job selling cosmetics door-to-door after she is fired by her ex-boyfriend. She ends up at the home of successful musical theater producer Maksim Shatalin, who desperately needs a nanny for his three children.
In an article on the website Ukraine World about how Ukrainians were denigrated in Russian film, Illia Gladshtein, a documentary film producer, offered this description of Nanna Vika.
Most of the film's jokes revolve around Vika's being a stereotypical Ukrainian migrant worker: she is vulgar and naive, wears bright outfits, speaks with a strong Ukrainian accent, and generally behaves like a "second class citizen".
According to the plot, Vika comes from Mariupol — a Ukrainian city now almost completely destroyed by the Russian army.
At least it’s somewhat better than the dehumanizing manner in which Ukrainians were portrayed as gangsters and Nazis in Russian films.
My Fair Nanny even had a Russian version of the American show’s animated opening credits. And the show even used the original scripts from The Nanny, which ran from 1993 to 1999 on CBS. with a few tweaks for the Russian audience.
In fact, My Fair Nanny, which ran until 2009, was so successful that they used up all the original U.S. scripts, and had to come up with several dozen new scripts for the final season. Sony Television Pictures even brought together some of the writers who had worked on The Nanny to create new scripts for the Russian version.
STS then acquired the rights to the Colombian telenovela, Yo soy Betty, la Fea , which aired in the U.S. as the sitcom Ugly Betty. The Russian version, titled Not Born Beautiful, starred Nelli Uvarova as a plain-looking woman, working as a secretary in a factory making uniforms and wedding dresses.
Here are the opening credits:
This adaptation, which ran from 2005-2006, was popular among Russian audiences, but even more popular among Ukrainian viewers.
STS’ success led rival private TV network TNT to search for yet another American sitcom to adapt for Russian audiences.
Here’s what Dmitry Troitskiy, TNT’s chief executive producer, said in an interview for the online MEL Magazine:
We thought, “What else can American classic television provide us with?” The choice was obvious: Married… with Children.
There were other options, like Cheers and Friends, but this is very hard to repeat [in Russia]. Cheers is about bar culture, which is a very American culture. The lifestyles in Friends are very different from Russian lifestyles. But Married...with Children is about a family — a dysfunctional family — so we thought, “Why not try?”
With the help of Sony executives in the U.S., the Russian producers went on a year-long casting trip across Russia to find the right people to play Russian versions of the Bundys. In the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg, they found provincial actor Viktor Loginov to play Gena Bukin (Al Bundy), while Moscow stage actor Natalya Bochkareva was cast as Dasha Bukina (Peg Bundy).
The Bukins live in an apartment in Yekaterinburg. Gena Bukin is a women’s shoe salesman whose life has gone downhill since he scored three goals in his high school football (soccer) championship game. The show was renamed Happy Together.
Troitskiy said:
In America, the saying “married with children” is like a stamp in your passport — it’s a social classification. You cannot literally translate this, so we got the title Happy Together from a Hong Kong film and we liked the sound of it. We thought, “Let’s put the focus on that this is a dysfunctional family, but this is a happy family.”
The credits will be strikingly familiar to anyone who watched the original.
Like My Fair Nanny, episodes were adapted from the American scripts for Married … with Children. But Rick Hawkins, Sony producer and consultant on Happy Together, said some jokes had to go.
He told MEL Magazine:
The original Married… with Children had a lot of bathroom humor, but Russians don’t think bathroom humor is funny. All you have to do is go into a public Russian bathroom to understand why it’s no laughing matter to them. Another really important thing we had to change was that Al Bundy was against the local, state and federal government — in Russia, absolutely not. Those jokes had to go.
But so much of it worked. It really did. …. The Russian persona is different — it’s, “I can overcome anything. I can suffer through anything.” That’s their badge of honor and that’s why Married… with Children resonated with them, because Al was this long-suffering character. He loved his wife, but he also hated her. His job was that he sold shoes. Suffer through your neighbors, suffer through your children, suffer through your marriage. This show was so Russian, so it really really worked.
.It worked so well, Happy Together ran on Russian television from 2006 through 2013.
The city of Yekaterinburg even erected a statue of local hero Gena Bukin, who put the city on the national popular culture map. Of course, he’s holding a women’s shoe.
Then the floodgates opened for Russian adaptations of American TV shows—and I’ll feature clips of several in the comments section.
Here are just a few of them: Who’s the Boss?, How I Met Your Mother, Jersey Shore (titled Holiday In Mexico), Full House, Bewitched, Perfect Strangers, Grace Under Fire, and my favorite title, It’s Always Sunny in Moscow.
But perhaps the most popular of all the TV adaptations was The Voronins, which ran from 2009 to 2019.
The Voronins became the most popular TV family in Russia.
Here’s a preview from the show. Can you guess which U.S. sitcom it was adapted from?
Here’s a hint:
The main characters are an ordinary family: Kostya (a sports journalist), Vera (a housewife), and their three children. Kostya’s parents live nearby, and his brother Lyonya, is a major in the police department.
Yes, it’s the Russian version of Everybody Loves Raymond. What’s more, the show’s American creator, Phil Rosenthal, made a hilarious documentary,Exporting Raymond, describing his experience working on the Russian version of his hit show.
Here’s the trailer to Exporting Raymond:
If anyone is wondering whether any American TV dramas were adapted for Russian television. The answer is, but of course! There were not one, but two versions of Law & Order—SVU and Criminal Intent.
Here are the opening credits to the Russian version of Law & Order: SVU.
The Russian TV industry learned from this experience and began creating original Russian TV sitcoms, with some success. In recent years, Putin began discouraging such co-production agreements for popular American shows. And with the imposition of tough Western sanctions after the invasion of Ukraine, there will be no such deals with U.S. television studios for the near future.
If Putin is removed from power and the war ends, which U.S. TV shows can you imagine being adapted for Russian television?