THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022 21
las Hofstadter’s ‘Strange Loop’ theory,
made into a half-hour comedy,” Lyonne
said. “That’s very satisfying to me.” Hof-
stadter’s book and many of the other
texts on her Season 2 reading list ex-
plore ideas about the construction of a
self or the hidden forces that shape a
life. Lyonne showed me an app called
Universe Splitter, which maps the re-
percussions of small individual choices
using quantum theory, and explained
that in the writers’ room they’d occa-
sionally use it to “open up story ideas
for fun.” She said, “The bigger question
I’m asking is if it’s true that we all have
the ability, regarding past trauma, to re-
orient ourselves around it, or if in fact
there is no free will, because it’s a set el-
ement of the universe, and therefore we
must just radically accept the full weight
of the past.”
“Russian Doll” came about after
Poehler approached Lyonne, in 2014,
with a concept for a sitcom, called “Old
Soul,” in which Lyonne would play a
reformed rebel working at a home for
the elderly. They pitched the show to
NBC and recruited Ellen Burstyn, Fred
Willard, and Rita Moreno as co-stars,
but the project languished in the pilot
stage. Poehler and Lyonne continued
exchanging ideas, one of which involved
Lyonne’s being stuck in a time loop and
entering a new romantic entanglement
each week. “I think it came from the
fact that I just selfishly love to watch
Natasha argue,” Poehler said. Lyonne
met with several potential showrunners
before settling on Leslye Headland, a
playwright and the director of such acer-
bic comedies as “Bachelorette” (2012)
and “Sleeping with Other People” (2015),
in which Lyonne had played a small
role. Together, the two decided to use
the “Groundhog Day” conceit to tackle
Lyonne’s troubled past through the met-
aphor of a death wish that won’t stop
coming true.
Headland recalled that Lyonne asked
her early on to read “You Can’t Win,”
the cult-classic memoir by Jack Black,
from 1926, about life as an opium-addicted
drifter. “That was a big ‘Aha’ moment
for me,” Headland said. “I saw that Na-
tasha is a transient figure, one who moves
in and out of spaces without ascribing
to social norms or dictates.” In “Russian
Doll,” the character of Nadia in some
ways fits the trope of the lonely young
woman in the big city. “She has the same
cat as Holly Golightly,” Headland said.
And yet the show is refreshingly unin-
terested in a conventional heroine’s jour-
ney toward romantic or professional
fulfillment. In 2017, Lyonne and Head-
land secured a straight-to-series order
from Netflix. They partnered with Jax
Media, the production company behind
“Broad City” and “Search Party,” and re-
cruited a team of quirky character actors
to populate the show’s surrealist world,
including Greta Lee, whose hilarious
performance as Maxine includes ditzily
uttering the greeting “Sweet birthday
babyyyyy!” each time Nadia crashes back
to the land of the living.
Because of the pandemic, Season 2
took three years to create. Headland left
the show before writing began, and in
2020 she signed on to make “The Ac-
olyte,” a “Star Wars” series for Disney+.
Lyonne cited the “Star Wars” commit-
ment as the reason for Headland’s de-
parture. “There’s also tricky stuff that
happened that has nothing to do with
me, to be honest,” she added without
elaborating. Headland didn’t comment
on the circumstances surrounding her
exit, but told me, “I used to say to Na-tasha all the time, ‘You have all these
incredible ideas, but it’s like you need
the gel cap to put the NyQuil in. It
doesn’t have a container.’ What I did for
the show was a lot of narrative wran-
gling. But, by the second season, I wasn’t
really sure I needed to be there any-
more.” Lyonne had some reservations
about stepping in to head the team, but
Jenji Kohan, the showrunner of “Or-
ange Is the New Black,” and Poehler
encouraged her. Poehler told me, “With
Russian nesting dolls, you open them
and they get smaller and smaller and
tighter and tighter. When you look at
the show, she is the distilled tiny doll.”
Lyonne jokes that she wants to become
like Robert Evans, the matinée idol who
went on to run Paramount Pictures in
its seventies glory days. “Even though
this is so stressful and intense, I’ve never
been happier,” she said. “As a child actor,
you have this hypervigilance that the
rug is gonna be pulled out from under
you. As the showrunner, I feel very calm
by having all the information.”
Lyonne loaded Season 2 of “Russian
Doll” with visual references to the au-
teurist cinema she reveres—Cassave-
tes’s “A Woman Under the Influence,”“Is it close enough to spring for nice weather
not to be existentially terrifying?”