Servant of the People (Seasons 1–3)

Servant of the People (2015) is a Ukrainian political comedy you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Oleksiy Kiryushchenko. History teacher Vasyl Holoborodko loses his temper mid-lesson, ranting at length about the corruption that runs his country. A student films it. It goes viral. The country elects him president.

Volodymyr Zelensky plays Holoborodko — a man who commutes to the presidential office by minibus, declines a security detail, and spends three seasons fighting a bureaucracy that has always known how to outlast anyone trying to fix it. Stanislav Boklan, Yevhen Koshovy, and Natalia Sumska round out the main cast. The show ran on Ukraine's 1+1 channel from 2015 to 2019.

It aired before Zelensky's actual entry into politics in 2019. That gives the series a strange double life now: taken as pure satire it holds up sharply; watched knowing what came after, it lands differently. Both readings are worth the time. Stream all seasons of Servant of the People online on iFILM.