Russian Doll

      I watched the last episode of season two of the Netflix series night before last, and find that I have thoroughly enjoyed both of them.

      Critics and reviewers have come up with all manner of frothy nonsense to describe it; one of my favorites is, "It's helpful to regard the series [...] as musical or poetic." (Robert Lloyd in the LA Times).  This sounds like pretentious nonsense, but it's more the result of a lack of context: TV critics are unlikely to have read much of the kind of contemporary-world fantasy that was published in Unknown magazine.  Wikipedia helpfully describes it as "combin[ing] commonplace reality with the fantastic."  These days, they call that sort of thing "Urban Fantasy" in print, and that's what Russian Doll gives you, one wrong turn short of a Shottle Bop, far less overt than Magic, Incorporated: a Fritz Lieber (at his most realistic) sort of fiction, nested right inside our own everyday world.

      A story like this, you have to trust the ride; you can trust each season of Russian Doll: a dark ride indeed, bumpy, startling and then back into the light, not quite where you started out.  Time well spent, if you will give it time.