a bednaya nastya nockoff that's possibly better than bednaya nastya? more likely than you think!

So apparently, there’s a recent Russian tv show with a conceit similar to Bednaya Nastya, but less soapy (as evidenced by having only 18 episodes and not like…3 million.) But it’s only less soapy, because it looks, from the summaries, that there is that same soapy black-and-white split between Bad characters and Good characters. Like the show looks really pretty and it’s a period drama and all but… a) not a fan of black-and-white good/bad character splits (it’s just bad writing tbh) and b) I (unfortunately?) find saccharine het couples nauseating (and boring).

ETA: I watched 3 eps, read all the ep summaries and watched just enough of the last ep to see that they killed off my fave. Ok then :/
 

On the other hand, second season of Godunov has been pretty good :)