Russian Doll resists conventional labels
New series peels away traditional storytelling elements, 30 minutes at a time
LOS ANGELES — When Natasha Lyonne, Leslye Headland and Amy Poehler put their heads together to come up with a show unlike any other, they knew they wanted it to be both funny and unafraid to tackle traumatic experiences that most comedies would avoid at all costs.
“We were always interested in themes that weren’t necessarily comedic on the surface, though we figured given our backgrounds that it would be pretty f---ing funny,” says Headland.
“So we knew going in that we were going to be straddling that genre line.”
The result was Russian Doll, a series that strategically rejects labels. Its eight-episode first season is now streaming on Netflix. It’s a twisty feat, layering jokes on top of tragedy on top of jokes to tell a complex story about a woman trapped in a time loop — and each instalment only needs 25 to 30 minutes to do it.
“I remember saying that we should think of it less as a comedy and more as just a 30-minute show,” says Headland. “To industry standards that means a comedy, but to us it doesn’t have to mean that.”
Conventional TV wisdom goes that dramas run at least an hour, while comedies run 30 minutes or less; even the Emmys now require shows to petition an Academy panel to justify why they should be considered in a genre that their run time suggests they don’t belong to. But increasingly, distinguishing series’ genre strictly by virtue of their length has become a far less accurate way of assessing them.
Take Homecoming. After gaining attention and accolades with his USA drama Mr. Robot, Sam Esmail was excited to adapt Gimlet Media’s dark audio drama podcast Homecoming into a TV series, and ended up pushing back against tradition and choosing a half-hour run time.
As bleak as Homecoming
may be, Eli Horowitz and Micah Bloomberg’s podcast told its story — about a therapist who helps soldiers transition to civilian life — in 30-minute episodes, and Esmail didn’t see a need to change the length when translating it to the screen just to check off the “drama” box.
That calculated gamble paid off.
When Amazon dropped 10 half-hour episodes of Homecoming in November, the series immediately made an impression, earning critical acclaim and several Golden Globe nominations for its trouble. (And yes, those nominations were in the drama categories.)
What makes the 30-minute drama structure so appealing for top showrunners? For starters, it removes some of the pressure that comes with having to juggle several narratives, says Tanya Saracho, creator of Starz’s Vida, which focuses on estranged Mexican-American sisters who return to their East L.A. roots. “In the one-hour shows I’ve been on (Devious Maids and How to Get Away With Murder among them), you have to serve so many storylines,” she says.
“If Vida was a longer show, I think I’d have to serve plots first. But this way, I get to follow my characters’ psyches and their emotional lives. Sometimes when the episode ends, it doesn’t even end with plot, but how the characters are feeling.”
Not that the half-hour drama or even “dramedy” is a brand-new concept. Some of TV’s earliest dramas — from The Twilight Zone to Gunsmoke — began as half-hours until the medium settled into a more strict genre binary and used run time to enforce it.
Indeed, the new wave of half-hour creators is quick to point out several examples that were influential.
Esmail steered Homecoming by studying HBO’s 2008 therapist drama In Treatment. Headland recalls marathoning Starz’s silken thriller The Girlfriend Experience and referring back to it when she, Lyonne and Poehler were fine-tuning the tone of Russian Doll.
For all these shows’ wildly varied subject matter and execution, they share one crucial trait: None of them needs to worry about commercials. It’s not impossible for a half-hour show to play against genre while factoring in hard act breaks (FX’s Atlanta springs to mind), but by all accounts, ad-free sure does help.
I remember saying that we should think of it less as a comedy and more as just a 30-minute show.” Writer Leslye Headland