Just Olga – Weekend – Kommersant
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The fifth and final season of “Olga” starts on TNT, which turned the idea of what Russian broadcast series could be like. We talk about the resilient main character played by Yana Troyanova and other important secrets of the project’s success.
Resigned to unquenchable sorrows, changing her hairstyle (she now has a platinum short haircut, like Natasha Kustova in “Kidney”) and seriously taking up fitness, the titular heroine of Yana Troyanova from now on devotes her days free from work to self-development: in the mornings – crossfit in the area, in the afternoon – watercolor painting, and in the evening – rolling mushrooms for the winter. She distributes the banks to her relatives – this, in essence, is the end of the help to the destructive family. The pedicurist decided to live for herself. As a single mother and for several seasons as a grandmother from Severnoye Chertanovo, Olga Terentyeva is about forty-five – it’s about time. Especially when you consider how much she had to endure in the previous four seasons, which turned this serial dramedy into one of the main phenomena of the Russian serial revolution.
“Olga” went on air on TNT back in the fall of 2016, when there were no Internet platforms with their looseness unavailable to film distribution and unfamiliar to on-air television. The Premier service, on which you can now review the past four seasons of Olga, started only two years later, in 2018. What was the serial market then? It was a real field of experiments, where they explored the boundaries of the permissible, bringing the space of streaming freedom closer. The episodes have become edgy. On the air of TNT – I will cite only the premieres of this channel as an example, so as not to get bogged down in transfers – the radical “Bearded Man” and the elegantly literary “Poor People” went out almost simultaneously; the mythology of the school film was enriched by Fizruk, and the urban outskirts – by the Law of the Stone Jungle. But even against this loose backdrop, “Olga” looked like an event.
Here, behind every hero – not a marginal, but an average person – a catastrophe loomed. Although, it would seem, an ordinary, traditional, multi-generational Russian family: a deep-drinking grandfather Jurgen comes from Soviet sports, a schoolgirl Anya who flew into the first episode, a dissolute but cheerful aunt Lena in an eternal search for the perfect man (or better than two), little Timofey (or Timur?), who decided at all costs to choose between Russian and Azerbaijani roots. There was no smell of dysfunction here, after all, not the American “Shameless”, but it seems that there were not so many reasons to laugh either. This constellation of small tragedies revolved around a star named Olga, daughter, mother, sister, reigning in the general chaos, dependent on him, tormented by him and at the same time reveling in him.
In Olga, Russia was relieved (and what, after all, not the worst version!) Recognized itself: both active and slovenly, longing for everything to be like people’s, and at the same time easily spitting on any rules, able to discern a mote in someone else’s eye without noticing the logs in his. The life credo of the heroine was formulated in the programmatic final monologue of the first season: “I always do something wrong, I choose something wrong, I fuss, puff up, but everything is not there at all.” With befitting moment seriousness, Olga said this to a reliable guy from Ryazan – a naive, but seemingly positive freak Grisha. It was hard not to see a kind of authorial irony in this – after all, a coffin always loomed behind Grisha in the course of the series.
It also seems ironic that Olga was created by the production company Good Story Media, responsible for the sweet Russian adaptations of the foreign sitcoms Voronina and How I Met Your Mother – and at its core, Olga is the same long-running family comedy with off-screen laughter, only in the circumstances of “Real Boys” (this is also a Good Story Media project). “Olga”, like any classic sitcom, lives in close connection with the viewer, she feeds on his energy and laughter. Its difference from sitcoms is only that they, by and large, do not aspire anywhere, they simply live with their audience until they scrape their heroes to the bottom. Until the viewer grows out of them. “Olga” is different, it has the potential for development. The energy of change is embedded in the series largely thanks to the heroine Troyanova. “Olga” was not originally written for a specific actress, but it was with Troyanova that she became herself – furious and forgiving, active and careless. Troyanova gave her her talent to change and accept changes, demanding them from screenwriters and producers every new season.
Today, when the word “end” looms on the poster of the new season, and the appearance of Troyanova on the screen seems like some unthinkable gift from a past life, I want to believe that the past years of cohabitation with a single mother from Chertanovo still did not pass for us in vain and we learned something from her — for example, the ability to accept the challenges of the time and change for the better.
Look: Premier
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