Season two of Russian doll will begin streaming on April 20, Netflix announced Monday alongside a video teaser. It’s a fitting premiere date for the trippy, genre-defying series that’s essentially a beautifully written and acted rendering of a very, very high person’s thoughts on mortality.
Featuring an impeccable Natasha Lyonne doing memorable line readings with her New York accent (see: “cockroach” and “Thursday, what a concept!”), Russian doll starts from the principle of groundhog dayplaces him in Alphabet City and adds a lot of drugs.
The first season introduced us to Nadia de Lyonne, a hard-partying software engineer who can’t seem to stay away from her married ex and who haunts Tompkins Square Park at night in search of her lost cat. After being hit by a car on her birthday night, she finds herself stuck in a time loop in which she repeatedly dies and continues to relive on the same day, always ending up at her birthday party from hell.
The new teaser sees Nadia sleeping inside an empty subway car, going through a tunnel. The suspenseful music crescendos, with shots of her in a graveyard, walking through crowds of people and falling through the air, eventually ending on the birthday party’s recognizable bathroom door. The clip undeniably captures the show’s frenetic sense of claustrophobia. “When the universe fucks with you, let it,” our stubborn heroine says, raising a glass.
The second season is set four years after the events of the first, which ended with Alan de Nadia and Charlie Barnett exiting the seemingly inescapable time loop. Lyonne serves as showrunner and executive producer on the series, alongside season one collaborators and co-producers Amy Poehler and Leslye Headland.
