YMMV / Servant of the People

• Actor Shipping: Many fans started shipping Volodymyr Zelenskyy (Holoborodko) and Olena Kravets (Mishchenko) long before the series started, since they were part of same comic group (Kvartal-95) and played together in many skits. Their chemistry was very good, as you can see.
• Better on DVD: Most plots span across multiple episodes. A lot of episodes seem to have originally been written as parts of two-part episodes, but only the first two episodes (released as a single video) are ever presented as such.
• Broken Aesop:
  • One of Vasiliy's biggest goal is the fight against corruption. Meanwhile, early on he appoints his closest friends (and ex-wife) as ministers. While the series presents this as assembling a team of highly moral True Companions, in reality this amounts to cronyism, which in fact is a form of corruption.
  • A similar situation happens in Season 2, where Vasiliy engages in conspiracy by faking Yuriy's death, prematurely ending his sentence, and granting him immunity via a fake identity to combat the oligarchs.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Some of Goloborodko's lines have not aged well since 2022, particularly his wary attitude against any opposition to Russia. Since the start of the war, the real Zelenskyy (who had worked a lot in Russian films and entertainment prior to Servant of the People) has been anything but hesitant to confront Vladimir Putin's invasion. The "hohol" speech also hasn't aged well, seeing as the word "hohol" is widely used as a Russian slur against Ukrainians (unlike in the series where it was meant as "yokel") and people supporting Ukraine steer clear from it. In the same speech, Goloborodko also mocks "bumpkin" Ukrainians for using a Ukrainian accent while speaking Russian (pronouncing "g" as "kh") when asking for things such as bribes or for their children to be sent to expensive schools. Even Goloborodko and his team speaking Russian can be seen as this, with Zelenskyy in Real Life now making a point of speaking Ukrainian. The speech ends with a summation of this mindset as the "mysterious soul" of "khokhols", which is nowadays used by pro-Western/pro-Ukraine Eastern Europeans in the expression "mysterious Russian soul" to highlight the same backwards traits (plus jingoism and imperialism) in the mindset of pro-war modern Russians.
  • There is a scene in the series where Goloborodko, driven to the breaking point by being subjected to constant and vicious criticism, imagines himself committing a mass murder at the Ukrainian parliament. While the scene was always Black Comedy, it is less funny after the Russian invasion and the real life threat it poses to everyone in Ukraine's government.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • A personification of the series as the protagonist's actor, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, became President of Ukraine in real life in 2019. Even moreso is that the fictional protagonist wins the election with 67% of the vote, a landslide. Zelenskyy won the real-life election with an even bigger landslide, with 72% of the vote. A number of news outlets around the world pointed out the parallels after the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine gave Zelenskyy a boost in international recognition.
  • One scene from the series has Angela Merkel call Goloborodko offering the nation membership in The European Union, only to be informed that Merkel meant to call the leader of Montenegro. In 2022, amidst the full-scale invasion of Ukraine by Russia, Zelenskyy formally started the process of Ukraine's accession to the European Union, while Montenegro has also started pushing for EU membership by 2028.
• Hollywood Homely: Towards the end of Season 1, Oksana has an argument with Mushkin where he orders her to loosen up and wear more makeup. At a dinner meeting that evening, she does a makeover so successfully he mistakes her for someone else.
• Narm: While not as notable as one could think, the Latin American Spanish dub suffers of this on regards of the use of Slavic names (Ukranian, Russian, etc.) and also overlaps with Values Dissonance for both that dubbed version and many of the foreign-translated versions: In many Slavic cultures, a junior addressing their senior is normally done by using Full-Name Basis, rather than calling the person by either their name or a surname with honorifics when required. As a result, its not unusual for some characters, like the protagonist Vasiliy Goloborodko, for one, being addressed by his students as "Vasiliy Petrovich" or his full name, without using the "Mr." honorific attached on it. While most western countries outside the Slavic world have problems with students addressing their mentors in such a way, in Latin America, and very especially in Mexico, the country the show was dubbed, addressing your school teacher by his full name without honorifics is considered an oddity at best, and a serious insult at worst; the same goes when addressing other seniors in the series.
• Seasonal Rot: Zelenskyy's announcement that he was running for the presidency of Ukraine in real life turned a significant part of viewers off from even attempting to watch the third and final season, for fear it would be nothing more than an hours-long political ad. Some of those who did watch the season say that indeed, it was one.
• Woolseyism:
  • As mentioned above, this was averted in the Latin American Spanish dub on regards of the use of Ukrainian names, as the dub retains its traditional use, regardless if the local audience can understand its original context or not.
  • The Japanese translation zig-zags this: While the local subtitles also keep the Slavic terms of addressing, especially between people of the same age range, the same cannot to be said when younger, unknown people address adults or when juniors addressing seniors in position of authority. This is more visible when Vasiliy is addressed by his students in Japanese. Rather than addressing him by either "Vasiliy Petrovich" or his full name, he is just addressed as "teacher/先生 sensei", without calling him by his name. Also, the use of other Japanese honorifics is quite inconsistent in the Japanese translation at many points of the series.

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