It’s about time TV got over its obsession with Soviet spies
The war in Ukraine is casting a shadow over mini-series that feature Russian baddies, says Stephen Armstrong
The Russian invasion of Ukraine has created a new frontline in the culture war – and this one involves live ammunition, rather than keyboard warriors. President Volodymyr Zelensky’s troops include Ukrainian TV producers, actors, filmmakers and musicians. Oleg Sentsov, the director of Rhino, Ukraine’s entry for the Venice Film Festival, and Andriy Khlyvnyuk, lead singer of Boombox, are serving in the territorial defence just outside Kyiv, while last Sunday, Crimean actor Pasha Lee was killed in Irpin.
Russian artists are divided; 115 Russian cinematographers signed an open letter denouncing the invasion, including Roman Vasyanov, the director of photography of films such as Suicide Squad and Fury, while
Mcmafia star Aleksey Serebryakov has described Putin as a liar and a thief. His
Mcmafia co-star Maria Shukshina, on the other hand, has supported the invasion, calling on Russian troops to “finish the mission”.
Which may have contributed to mistaken media reports that the show – which was centred around a criminal Russian oligarch family living in London – has just had its second season cancelled. Not so, according to the BBC – although future casting is “yet to be confirmed”.
Misha Glenny, the show’s creator, plans to reflect the conflict when the show does eventually start filming. “Season one lifted a curtain on the many shocking truths playing out on the geopolitical stage,” he says. “The makers are fully aware of what is going on in the world now, and this will be reflected in season two. It will have its finger on the pulse of contemporary events and realities like few others.”
How that will be cast – especially given the presence of Russian actors, some of whom actively back Putin – presents an issue. Indeed, awkwardly, TV is currently approaching “peak Russian” on screen. Killing Eve’s new series, for example, has a first episode that must have looked good on the page at the time of writing, with cuddly Danish actor Kim Bodnia’s Russian handler Konstantin Vasiliev now mayor of a Russian town in an office covered in CCCP propaganda.
Elsewhere, Joe Cole’s Harry Palmer can be seen on ITV, jousting the KGB in The Ipcress File. Netflix is preparing to launch season two of Russian Doll,
with Natasha Lyonne’s Russian software engineer Nadia Vulvokov reliving her fatal 36th birthday again and again. The Great – a jovial romp through the rise of Tsarina Catherine – has just concluded season two and is starting work on season three.
Even The Crown has a Russian connection, as the next series promises to follow Imelda Staunton’s Queen Elizabeth to the Kremlin in 1994 – with Bradford standing in for Moscow.
Disney, meanwhile, has had Russian cops out in London’s Old Street and Leeds as it films its unfortunately titled new Marvel series Secret Invasion,
starring Samuel L. Jackson and Olivia Colman. There’s also, surely, a question mark over the future of the Black Widow franchise, which was supposed to continue with Florence Pugh’s KGB assassin slipping into the catsuit.
Portraying Russians on screen has always been a matter of tropes. During the Cold War, they were either sleeper spies like Boris and Natasha in Rocky and Bullwinkle, savage killers such as Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love,
and evil übermensch like Dolph Lundgren in Rocky IV.
In the UK – where the Russian Bond villain has been a stock in trade right up to the latest 007 outing – we had sailors out on the town in Letter to Brezhnev and Nigel Havers and Warren Clarke’s rogue sleeper agents enjoying the comforts of the West in Sleepers. There’s something charming about America seeing Ivan as deadly and seductive, while Brit producers saw them as horny and easily seduced.
It took a few decades after the fall of the Berlin Wall for Russian characters to enjoy cultural glasnost and for actual Russian actors to pop up. Vladimir Mashkov starred in 2011’s Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, while in 2013, mini-series The Americans saw Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell blend soap opera and 1960s spycraft as married, deep-cover Soviet agents with unsuspecting American-born children.
Streaming services have also cashed in on the lucrative private financing from the likes of Roman Abramovich’s $100million film fund launched in 2019. Until pulling its service from Russia earlier this week, Netflix had fewer than one million subscribers in the country. But it was planning to lure more, with four Russian original series in the works: a “neo-noir” detective show, a contemporary reworking of Anna Karenina, a disabilities drama, and a fourth, unidentified series. All but the detective show have finished filming.
Apple TV, meanwhile, was due to release its first Russian-language series this spring – a drama about surrogacy and the super-rich named Container.
“In the past few years, Russian TV, Russian actors and Russian COSOHO production money was doing very well across the world,” explains Ed Waller, editor of TV trade bible C21. “So-called ‘Moscow noir’ was a big hit for Netflix, with shows like To the Lake, The Method and Better than Us – and they’ve been investing a lot of money in Russia. It took a week for the industry to really get to grips with the invasion of Ukraine and impose cultural sanctions, cancelling deals and programme sales.”
As plugs were being pulled, Channel 4 broadcast 2015’s Servants of the People, a Ukrainean fictional comedy about a teacher who becomes president, which was created and produced by Zelensky, and who stars in the lead role. The show has been credited with launching his real-life political career.
And it was, Waller explains, the unexpected consequence of a very specific cultural breakdown. Until 2014, most Ukrainian TV was made with Russian money. The two countries collaborated on epic Second World War tales that recounted the battles they fought side by side. But Russian TV was banned in Ukraine after the invasion of Crimea, and Ukrainian producers had to rapidly gear up to start making their own shows.
Zelensky’s production company Kvartal Studio 95 had been selling reality show formats to a largely uninterested world while he himself was scraping by doing voiceovers for
Paddington Bear. But in 2015, when Ukraine’s 1+1 channel suddenly needed new programming, it green-lighted his political satire – which means that one knock-on effect from Russia’s takeover of Crimea led to him uniting Ukraine in the face of a full-scale invasion.
For TV industry creatives, the Russian baddie is certainly back.
Stranger Things, which returns to Netflix for a fourth series in May, added Russian spies in season three, which ended with the Soviets breeding their own Demogorgon and Sheriff Hopper being locked up in Kamchatka.
Even Alex Garland’s 2020 series
Devs, which takes place in the Silicon Valley tech sector teeming with immigrants, allows every nation to avoid its stereotype except the Russian, who is revealed as a spy by episode two. The only casually Russian character in today’s TV landscape is Anna Volovodov in The Expanse, an Amazon sci-fi series in which Russia as a country doesn’t even exist.
As the Russian assault continues, TV execs won’t be pitching anything requiring an übermensch villain, a ruthless spy or a despicable troll farm anytime soon. Misha Glenny won’t discuss the details of his second season of Mcmafia. But after so many images of terrified Russian conscripts sobbing on the phone to their mothers, it’s going to be hard to see Russia depicted as anything other than a tragedy.