Осторожно, модерн! (Seasons 1–5)

Ostorozhno, Modern! (1996) is a Russian sketch comedy series you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Andrei Balashov and Anna Parmas. It ran on Channel Six and STS from 1996 to 1998, starring Dmitry Nagiyev and Sergei Rost.

The show lampooned everything Russia was calling "modern" in the nineties: new-money excess, advertising-speak, television hype, and the peculiar rituals of the post-Soviet office class. Nagiyev here is young and sharp-edged — far from the polished TV host persona he built later. As a comedy snapshot of what it felt like when the Soviet world collapsed and something stranger replaced it, the series holds up better than most of the things it was mocking. Watch Ostorozhno, Modern! online on iFILM.