Would you rather have your characters be likable and unfunny, or unlikable and funny? We’d rather see the latter, mainly because we know there will be room for growth and change — as well as the fact that we like funny characters. But what if most of the characters in a supposed comedy are both unlikable and unfunny?
Opening Shot: We see a woman looking behind her as she runs away from something. She hits a glass door, and we see that her white dress isn’t only covered in blood but she’s holding a knife.
The Gist: Aniela (Małgorzata Kożuchowska) thinks she has a perfect life with her husband Janek (Jacek Poniedziałek) and their daughter Łucja (Lila Vasina). When she gets caught by the police, she tells the detectives booking her that “we made it work,” given his big-time corporate law career and her “humanitarian” bent. It helps that she uses his gold card.
On the night of a big opening at her gallery, Aniela is waiting for Janek to show up; he’s been trying to find himself lately, and he claims to be at a “man’s retreat.” She snarks off to Marecki (Cezary Pazura), a family friend and Janek’s lawyer, and blows off her own lawyer/best friend Ewa (Gabriela Muskala) when Janek arrives.
But Janek has bad news; he thinks they should split up. He’s not only balanced his chakras or whatever the hell he did there, but he fell in love with a woman named Zofia (Renata Dancewicz) that he thinks he was together with in a previous life. Aniela does whatever someone who thinks their life is suddenly falling apart would do: She grabs a knife off the buffet and stabs Janek multiple times.
As Janek is writhing and bleeding, she runs, but as we see, she’s arrested soon enough and booked on assault charges. In holding, Marecki comes to bail out his son Banan (Antek Sztaba), a rapper arrested for possession, who rats out one of a trio of young women — Lina (Pitry Pitry), Viola (Anita Szepelska) and Maja (Rozalia Rusak) — for selling to him. Marecki sees Aniela in holding and tells her that maybe she’ll learn something from rotting in a cell for awhile.
Janek, out of the hospital and admiring his stab wounds, has a deal for Aniela: Sign divorce papers and leave the house with no claim to his money, and he won’t press attempted murder charges. She reluctantly takes the deal.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Aniela is reminiscent of another recent “rich person starting from rock bottom” series, Your Friends & Neighbors.
Our Take: Aniela is supposed to be a comedy. And there are comedic situations all around the title character. But Aniela herself is a pretty awful person. It seems that a typical interaction for her is like one we see in the first episode, where she jokes with an Uber driver that she’s going to ruin his rating with a 1-star review, says she’s kidding, then gives him 1 star anyway. She’s just awful to everyone around her who can’t glorify her own image, including Ewa.
It’s to the point where we almost understand why Janek has decided to boot her to the curb. He tells her that this will be good for her, essentially telling her that she’s got her head so far up her own butt that she can’t see just how terrible she really is.
So we get how the story is going to be; Aniela is going to hit rock bottom, and even though people like Ewa’s identical twin sister Edyta (also Muskala) provides her a hand with a job at her foundation and a free apartment, Aniela is going to bitch and complain that she lives in a housing project on the “poor” side of Warsaw.
But it seems that, while she bitches and complains, she’ll be determined to work her way back to circles she used to run in, even if it’s just for the sake of being able to see her daughter Łucja again. So Aniela may keep some of her jerkiness, but the idea is that we’re going to see her transform into someone who can stand on her own feet without the help of her wealthy husband, perhaps even with the help of Lina, Viola and Maja, who live in the same projects.
But the first episode really didn’t make us laugh or even chuckle, mainly because almost everyone in it was acting like privileged assholes, something we’ve seen far too much of on TV lately.
Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.
Parting Shot: After Aniela cleans up the messy apartment she’s given, she goes down to a landing where she left some of her luggage. Predictably, it’s been stolen. She screams out into the night, “I have no one!”
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Gabriela Muskala because, even though both Ewa and Edyta are awkward, they’re awkward in very different ways, and she does well with both.
Most Pilot-y Line: This show has one of the longest end credits sequences we’ve ever seen for a 38-minute comedy; it’s about eight minutes long!
Our Call: SKIP IT. Aniela tries too hard to be funny and fails at every turn. We hope that the title character gets some more humanity as she struggles to rebuild her life, but she’s just one of a number of unlikable, unfunny characters in this series.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.