Season two of Russian Doll will start streaming on April 20, Netflix announced on Monday alongside a video teaser. It’s a fitting premiere date for the trippy, genre-defying series that is essentially a beautifully written and acted rendering of a very, very high person’s thoughts about mortality.
Starring an impeccable Natasha Lyonne doing some memorably delightful line readings in her trademark New York accent (see: “cock-a-roach” and “Thursday, what a concept!”), Russian Doll takes the premise of Groundhog Day, sets it in Alphabet City, and adds lots of drugs.
Season one introduced us to Lyonne’s Nadia, a hard-partying software engineer who can’t seem to stay away from her married ex and who haunts Tompkins Square Park at night searching for her lost cat. After being hit by a car on the night of her birthday, she finds herself stuck in a time loop in which she dies repeatedly and keeps reliving the same day, always winding up back at her birthday party from hell.
The new teaser sees Nadia asleep in an empty subway car, hurtling through a tunnel. The suspenseful music crescendos, with shots of her in a graveyard, pushing through a crowd of people, and falling through the air, eventually ending on the recognizable bathroom door from the birthday party. The clip undeniably captures the show’s frantic sense of claustrophobia. “When the universe fucks with you, let it,” our headstrong heroine says while raising a glass.
The second season takes place four years after the events of the first one, which ended with Nadia and Charlie Barnett’s Alan finding their way out of the seemingly inescapable time loop. Lyonne serves as showrunner and executive producer of the series, alongside season one collaborators and co-producers Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland.
