'Servant of the People' is an inspiring winner

Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger were able to lean on their movie careers to get elected governor of California, which led Reagan to higher office and Schwarzenegger back to Hollywood.

Donald Trump's high profile from his reality TV show was credited with helping him win the presidency, although his social media presence played at least as large a part in that.

But none of those three entertainers went directly from playing the president of their country on TV to getting elected president in real life, which sets Volodymyr Zelenskyy apart.

After three seasons of "Servant of the People" - in 2015, 2017 and 2019, with a 2016 film that was expanded to become the second season - Zelenskyy was elected president of Ukraine in 2019 by running under a political party named Servant of the People.

Netflix decided it was the ideal time to make "Servant of the People" available to American audiences starting March 16, and as of this writing, I've watched 10 of the first season's 23 episodes.

Speaking as someone who knew almost nothing about Ukraine before Russia invaded last month, I was able to follow "Servant of the People" easily because Zelenskyy plays its freshly elected president as an affable, inquisitive everyman who needs the intricacies of the country's government explained to him even as he tries to root out corruption.

This show combines the earnest belief in citizen government of director Ivan Reitman's "Dave" from 1993 (which I recommended to you all after his recent passing) with the hilariously blasé cynical acknowledgment of pervasive government corruption in Armando Iannucci's "The Thick of It" on BBC and "Veep" on HBO.

Old-school PBS fans might detect some similarities between Zelenskyy's politely duplicitous, slickly silver-haired prime minister and the sadly departed Sir Nigel Hawthorne's Sir Humphrey Appleby on "Yes, Minister" because both gentlemen are informative and accommodating senior advisers whose aim is to thwart the reformist goals of the well-meaning men they work for.

Watching this show won't give you an education on what the Ukrainian government is actually like, but as an effective satire, it tells you a lot about how the Ukrainian people saw their own government before Zelenskyy's real-life election.

While this political sitcom speaks its own cultural idiom, American audiences anywhere on the political spectrum can identify with the nation's ailments, from weariness with wasteful spending to frustration over cronyism.

The relatives of Zelenskyy's character (a formerly underpaid high school history teacher) go through a phase of feeling like they've won the lottery, but his closest friends soon feel as though their proximity to the new president has been weaponized against them. He recruits them to be cabinet ministers in spite of how catastrophically unqualified several of them are.

I suspect it says something about the realpolitik of Ukraine that, even as Zelenskyy's protagonist is treated as genuinely pure of heart by the narrative, he still has to employ unqualified cronyism of his own in order to defeat the government's levels of meritocracy-free cronyism.

This is a show that's so jaded about politics that it actually distills the forces working against our would-be "Servant of the People" down to a trio of seemingly all-powerful oligarchs whose faces are never fully shown. The portrayals remind me of the Syndicate from "The X-Files."

As much as its sharp yet understated writing - with occasional breaks for the broad comedy of fantasy sequences starring Lincoln, Caesar and Che Guevara - what helps sell this scenario is Zelenskyy himself, whose frequently slumped shoulders and cigarette-voiced charm lend him the exasperated air of a young Bruce Willis.

Who knows? This guy could really go places in his career.

If nothing else, "Servant of the People" is worth watching for its glimpses of Kyiv in better days, which the show's intro captures as knowingly and affectionately as Tony's drive home through New Jersey in every episode of "The Sopranos."