Issue 87 (2025) |
Evgenii Nevskii: Goodbye (Gudbai, TV, 2024) reviewed by Alexander Prokhorov and Elena Prokhorova © 2025 |
To understand the spirit of the new TV series Goodbye, one just needs to open any issue of the Soviet-era newspaper Pravda and find a cartoon by Boris Efimov satirizing Uncle Sam. Russia’s TNT Channel released Goodbye the week before the 2024 US presidential elections and the show's premise was quite topical—the way Russian government-controlled television sees it. Frustrated by Russia’s unity and economic success in the face of US sanctions, the malicious President Biden decides to take matters into his own hands. He travels to Russia undercover to figure out how Russia can survive under sanctions and how to undermine the Russian economy. Playing Biden is Dmitrii Diuzhev, who started his career in the roles of the sympathetic mobster Kosmos in Aleksei Sidorov’s gangster saga The Brigade (Brigada, 2002) and a thug Simon in Aleksei Balabanov’s spoof of the gangster genre Dead Man’s Bluff (Zhmurki, 2005). Since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Diuzhev has been a vocal supporter of Russian aggression.
Satirical representations of politicians are quite common in Western film and television. Saturday Night Live (1975-present) obviously set a benchmark across the globe, while the Ukrainian Servant of the People (2015-19), starring Volodymyr Zelenskyy, pushed the envelope in Eastern Europe. In Zelenskyy’s series, satire is self-reflexive and targets domestic corruption with scathing critique for several seasons, until the utopian ending. In contrast, Goodbye does not dare to be either self-reflexive or even consistently satirical. For example, it opens with the pledge of loyalty to Putin—the footage of a propaganda rally on the notorious Russia Today channel. Not surprisingly, a reviewer noted that Goodbye is a far cry from such satirical representations of power as Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) or The Death of Stalin (2017) by Armando Iannucci. In fact, Goodbye sticks to the tradition of sketch comedy on Russia’s TNT channel (Myshkin 2024), just with a stronger brew of anti-Americanism, which takes the viewers into the realm of cringe and absurdity.
Upon arrival to Russia, Biden loses his papers and money and has to rely on Russians’ kindness to get by. Meanwhile, the two CIA agents who were sent to protect Biden, lose him at the airport and then mistakenly identify a Russian look-alike (also played by Diuzhev) as Biden. Coincidentally, Biden speaks decent Russian because he is a Cold War-era politician, while Biden’s Russian double speaks perfect English. Even in this basic linguistic competition, Russia wins. While Biden coming to Russia needs a cover story explaining that he is Ivan Ivanovich who spent thirty years in the US and lapsed in his Russian skills, Biden’s Russian double raises no suspicions. The CIA agents take the Russian double back to the US and put him at the helm of the nation.
Russia’s superiority is not limited to language, of course. Pretender Biden has a sex tryst with Jill Biden and satisfies her appetite after ten years of sexual famine. If this sounds distasteful, it is indeed. The reviewer from Moscow Times notes: “A chuckle may escape the viewer's lips. But it would be a laugh laden with cringe rather than the mark of true comedic brilliance” (Babin 2024). Ultimately, the plot of The Prince and the Pauper is used to mock a Westerner in Russia and to celebrate the comic accomplishments of a Russian who is at least no worse than the original Biden. All this to say, 99.9% of the so-called humor in this series is at the expense of Biden, not as a politician but as an old man.
The series establishes a clear paradigm from the beginning: its insulting jokes (sight gags, narrative turns, and bits of dialogue) target identities that in Western societies are protected from discrimination, such as race, gender, sexuality, age, and people with disabilities. The opening scene of Goodbye establishes the moral compass for the rest of the show. Biden, who is unaware that US sanctions are boosting the Russian economy, suggests taking McDonalds out of Russia. His two assistants remind him that, according to his own orders, this has already been done. At which point, Biden compliments the assistant with a transphobic comment: “Mr. Morgan, your new gender really suits you.” When his other assistant suggests that there still might be another plan to harm Russia, Biden exclaims that his assistant might want to shove this plan up his “black, formerly white ass.” To say that this is a racist comment is to give it too little credit: this nonsensical remark implies that, in the “woke” America, ruled by what Russian propaganda calls non-traditional values, white people feel pressure to transition from white to black identities to advance their careers.
Of course, the TNT Channel has never been known as a beacon of tolerance or human decency, as its flagship projects Our Russia (2006-2011) and Dom-2 (2004 to the present) testify. Even in Russia, lawsuits were brought up against the channel for stoking ethnic tensions and mocking the Tajik community (Ovchinnikov 2010). Insulting Americans, transgender people, African Americans, and LGBTQI+ people is not at all surprising for a Russian channel of that caliber. However, the original script of the pilot episode that Mediazona obtained was much worse in representing both the US and Russia than what the channel eventually aired at the end of October 2024. Diana Sherman (2024) reports that in the original script, for example, there were homophobic jokes about CIA agents accompanying Biden. Also, Biden arrives not to a hotel in Russia, but to a brothel. When the police detain Biden and the brothel’s receptionist, the cops make salacious comments and insist that the two have had a sexual relationship because the policemen want to fabricate a criminal case and successfully "solve" it. Sherman contends that one can watch the final version of the show with disgust but without a barf bag.
This abusive representation of the American president and his entourage exists against the backdrop of the idyllic world of the present-day Russia. This conflict-less depiction of Russia might be an even more important agenda of the show than its crude anti-Americanism. On the plane to Moscow, Biden meets his future friend and mentor—high school gym teacher Aleksei. He takes Biden to the small town of Lobnia, where simple and kind Russians reside. The salt-of-the-earth guy, who resides in a heart-warming khrushevka apartment building and who goes to his neighbor’s dacha to help her with the vegetable garden, is Russia’s secret weapon. Biden, of course, tags along because he believes that the gym teacher will help him understand the secret of Russia’s strength. And Biden eventually understands why nobody can conquer Russia: Russians comprise a great family where everyone helps each other for free, the camaraderie is rock solid, heteronormativity is immutable, and vodka solidifies the utopian community. Keeping in mind how multiethnic and multi-denominational the Russian Federation is, the community as represented by the show is surprisingly white, exclusively Russian, and presumably Orthodox Christian.
The setting of the show in a small town outside of glamorous Moscow can be explained by the TNT target audience. As Sherman (2024) notes, TNT’s typical viewers are not high-earning hipsters who reside in Moscow City high-rises. For the most part, these viewers live in the Russian heartland and have limited income. So, the show depicts what the creators, who of course live in Moscow and earn above-average salaries, imagine as salt-of-the-earth Russia. Can those Russians be flattered by such orientalizing caricatures? According to Goodbye, Russians are better than Americans, and this should suffice. The theme song (performed by Tat'iana Kurtukova) contributes to this lubok-style portrayal of Russians outside of Moscow’s penthouses: “Dear Mother-Land, Little birch tree, for me you are Holy Rus’, for others you are a pain in the neck” (literally “a splinter”)/ “Mathushka zemlia–belaia berezon’ka, dlia menia sviatia Rus’, dlia drugikh zanozon’ka.”
The “true” Russia includes a state-sponsored resort where senior citizens, all of them fit and full of energy, improve their health by exercising, doing yoga, Nordic walking, and enjoying free medical services. Everything is set in a beautiful Stalin-era neo-classical mansion and evokes the atmosphere of conflict-less Stalinist comedies. One important difference, though, is the fact that in the TNT series, the blissful atmosphere of the Russian resort reignites sexual desire in senior citizens—an unimaginable narrative turn in Stalinist films. In contrast, things at the White House do not go as planned. The faux Biden welcomes the US women’s swim team and discovers that the team's captain is a man who identifies as a woman. The faux Biden grabs the swimmer's beard and declares that a guy cannot self-identify as a broad, bringing the White House to the brink of a national scandal. That kind of cross-cutting between scenes set in traditional and honest Russia and the hypocritical and perverse US is the major rhetorical device of the show. Most comments by domestic viewers in Russia on kinoteatr.ru claim that “whatever else this series is, its humor is not malicious. This is a kind, good, and unpretentious show.”
Tina Kandelaki, the director of the TNT Channel and the general producer of Goodbye, concurs and goes even further in claiming that: “This is a type of propaganda we must make for the people who are nostalgic for feeling strong and generous—people who offer help even to our enemies. Because we are stronger, because we are smarter, because we are from Russia” (cited in Voronezhskii 2024). In the context of such a normalized delusion, Goodbye is an important symptom of utter confusion between good and evil, smart and dumb, joke and insult. On 6 November 2024, Goodbye’s director Evgenii Nevskii announced that the team is considering making season two, this time about the newly elected president (Sokolov 2024). Get the popcorn (or a barf bag) ready.
Alexander Prokhorov and Elena Prokhorova
College of William & Mary
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Works Cited
Babin, Alexander. 2024. “Joe Biden Comedy Bids ‘Goodbye’ to Intelligent Russian TV Satire.” Moscow Times,7 November.
Myshkin, Konstantin. 2024. “Retsenziia na serial ‘Gudbai’—krinzh-komediiu pro Sonnogo Dzho s Dmitriem Diuzhevym.”Film.ru, 5 November.
Ovchinnikov, Aleksei. 2010. “Tadzhiki podaiut v sud na Ravshana i Dzhamshuta.” Komsomol’skaia pravda, 22 March.
Sherman, Diana. 2024. “‘Gudbai’: TNT nachal pokaz oskorbitel’nogo seriala o plokhikh amerikantsakh i khoroshikh russkikh.” SOTA, 31 October.
Sokolov, Ivan. 2024. “Rezhisser seriala o prikliucheniiakh Baidena v Rossii dopustil, chto poiavitsia novyi sezon pro Trampa.” Daily Storm,6 November.
Voronezhskii, Maksim. 2024. “Tina Kandelaki o seriale pro Baidena.” Gazeta.ru,29 October.
Goodbye, 2024
Color, 8 episodes, 179 minutes
Director: Evgenii Nevskii
Screenplay: Aleksandr Baldin, Aleksandr Fedaev, Dmitrii Voevoda, et al.
Cinematography: Sergei Baskoev
Production Design: Aleksei Vorontsov
Musical Producer: Denis Dubovik
Cast: Dmitrii Diuzhev, Aleksei Demidov, Marusia Klimova, Ol’ga Bogdanova, Anna Ukolova, Evgeniia Shcherbakova, Nikota Diuvbanov, Mikhail Bogdasarov
Producers: Tina Kandelaki, Arkadii Vodakhov, et al.
Production: TNT Channel, Premier, 1-2-3 Productions
Release: 28 October 2024
Evgenii Nevskii: Goodbye (Gudbai, TV, 2024) reviewed by Alexander Prokhorov and Elena Prokhorova © 2025 |