A Review of the New Russian Sitcom About Joe Biden

It's really as bad as you think

If you’re relatively new to the issues related to Kremlin propaganda and how it’s affecting other countries (including the United States), I recommend reading some background posts I wrote that explains things in more detail along with links to other sites where you can read more to educate yourself.

Last year I wrote about a new Russian sitcom about US President Joe Biden that was going to air on Russian television. This sitcom, called Goodbye, has the premise where Joe Biden decides to secretly travel to Russia in order to find out why US sanctions against that country aren't working. In the process he manages to lose his passport. He also has no money because his credit and debit cards don't work due to the fact that Russia was removed from the SWIFT banking system. In order to raise much-needed money so he can get a new passport that would enable him to return to the United States, he gets a job as an English teacher.

Basically the premise of Goodbye is the reverse of the Ukrainian sitcom Servant of the People, which featured a high school teacher (played by Volodymyr Zelenskyy) who becomes the president of Ukraine after he appeared in a viral video. Zelenskyy later ran for president of Ukraine in real life and he won. In contrast, Goodbye took a real life president (played by Dmitry Dyuzhev), moved him to Russia, and turned him into a teacher.

There were a couple of challenges with Goodbye. The show was announced shortly after Joe Biden announced that he wasn't going to run for reelection, which meant that the sitcom was going to be dated by the time it aired in Russia. Another challenge is that I had read an English translation of the script for the pilot episode and I didn't find it very promising at all. The script was simply not funny, which is bad for a show that is supposed to be a comedy.

Roman from the NFKRZ YouTube channel had managed to watch all eight episodes of the first (and probably only) season of Goodbye and he gave a snarky negative review that basically confirmed my misgivings about that pilot episode script. This show features unfunny jokes about trans people and anal rape along with Russian propaganda aimed at the Russian people. Here's the video review of Goodbye, which includes brief excerpts from all eight episodes so you can see for yourself how bad it really is.

Servant of the People was such a hit that it was aired for three seasons and it also led to a full length feature theatrical film. It's highly doubtful that there will ever be a second season of Goodbye. The very end of the last episode shows Joe Biden, who had just returned to the White House after his misadventures in Russia, deciding that his heart is just not into being president anymore, he has become enamored with the Russian way of life, and he basically wants out of the White House. He then leaves the room. That scene sounds like something that was added at the last minute in order to at least make the series reflect real life events.

To be honest, you'd probably be better off watching old episodes of Servant of the People.

UPDATE (January 20, 2025): I was inspired to write this update to my previous post from last year about Goodbye after I came across the review of the series by NFKRZ on YouTube. I initially wrote a rough draft of this post only to have the video removed from YouTube on copyright grounds after complaints from the Russian media and gas company Gazprom shortly before I was about to upload it on Substack. This post is heavily dependent on people being able to see that video because, without it, it was basically a retread of last year's post that I wrote. And it was the only way that I can even legally show any excerpts from that show because, despite the fact that the sitcom is based on a real life US president, that series is not airing or streaming anywhere in the United States due to current sanctions against Russia.

So I deleted that rough draft only to find out that the video was restored on YouTube a couple of days later. So I rewrote my original post that I deleted earlier and you're now reading it. Roman from NFKRZ did a followup video about his dealings with both YouTube and Gazprom about his review of Goodbye that's worth watching because it's obvious that someone at YouTube needs to read up on fair use and how doing a review using excerpts from copyrighted material, as Roman did when he reviewed Goodbye, falls under fair use.

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