Russia's Wink streaming service has begun airing "Hard to Be a God" ("Trudno byt Bogom"), a 10-episode series based on the 1963 novella by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, according to Lenta.ru. The show, directed by Dmitry Tyurin from a screenplay by Andrei Zolotarev, is produced by NMG Studio and Team Films and is also set to air on the NTV television channel.
Each episode runs about an hour, and the series is due out in 2026. The cast is led by Alexandar Radojicic, Sergei Bezrukov, Nikita Kologrivyi and Lev Zulkarnaev.
The story is set on the planet Kepler-4077, where the civilization of Arkanar is judged by the board of directors of RosAtom to be sliding toward fascism. For fifteen years the alien world has failed to climb out of its medieval state, and officials warn that without intervention it risks repeating the history of 20th-century Germany.
Joan (Nina Senikar), head of the Institute of History, contacts officials in orbit around Kepler-4077 to try to buy her observation staff more time. The leadership refuses to budge, giving the researchers only a couple of months to steer the planet toward progress or see the program shut down.
An Earthling's Search for His Father
That deadline is bad news for Anton (Alexandar Radojicic), an earthling pursuing personal goals of his own on Arkanar. He is searching for his missing father (Viktor Dobronravov), also a "progressor" who had been living in Arkanar under the guise of a healer named Budach.
After Anton's predecessor is killed by a crossbow bolt fired from ambush, Anton, who had been stuck in orbit, is finally sent down to the planet. Adopting the identity of a noble foreigner, Don Rumata, he serves under a senior colleague, Don Kondor (Sergei Bezrukov). From there the plot follows a classic swashbuckling arc: freeing the stubborn Baron Pampa (Nikita Kologrivyi), seducing the fervent priestess Okana (Victoria Isakova), and rescuing Kira (Irina Pautova) from the Merry Tower.
Don Rumata quickly shows that being a god is not hard so much as exciting, and that the progressors' rules, including a ban on killing, exist to be broken. In the first episode alone, he avenges the king's killer, sabotages a local torture chamber over a woman he meets by chance in a corridor, and kidnaps a local prison boss (Nikolai Kozak) to have his mind reprogrammed aboard the orbital station. According to Lenta.ru, these additions by screenwriter Andrei Zolotarev remain true to the spirit of the source material.
From Soviet Novella to a Star Trek-Era Trope
The Strugatsky brothers' novella, published in 1963, carried a heavy social and political subtext but was first and foremost an adventure story about undercover observers embedded among a less advanced civilization, a trope that became globally famous three years later with the American series "Star Trek". Written during an era of Soviet power that both launched cosmonauts into orbit and sent bulldozers to crush exhibitions of abstract art, the novella's story of progress battling ignorance gathered melancholy echoes of life on Earth. Lenta.ru notes that the plot reads somewhat differently today but has lost none of its relevance.
Comparisons to Dune and Game of Thrones
The show's creators focused on giving the Soviet-era novella a modern aesthetic. The series allows itself moments of self-aware irony, including a line delivered over the corpse of a character played by Leonid Yarmolnik, asking who traded him away, a nod to Yarmolnik's role as Rumata in Alexei German's earlier film of the same story. The series also features competent action sequences with stunts, striking shots of spacecraft flying past a double star system, and paratroopers wielding blasters alongside armored noble dons. Landscapes shot on the Iranian plateau lend the show a modern style reminiscent of "Dune".
Nearly everyone involved has compared the series to Denis Villeneuve's "Dune" trilogy, but critics more often cite "Game of Thrones", and with good reason. Like the HBO fantasy hit, Zolotarev's series devotes much of its screen time to palace intrigue and geopolitical scheming. A single throne-room scene in the first episode, introducing viewers to Arkanar's state apparatus and the details of interplanetary medieval diplomacy, runs a lengthy eight minutes. Combined with dialogue among royal figures in chambers, chapels and on fortress walls, the show reads as a full palace thriller as much as a knightly romance. The cast of key characters has grown accordingly, adding Don Kub, played by Fyodor Bondarchuk, whose presence recalls his own Strugatsky adaptation "Inhabited Island", along with a string of ministers whose names are harder to keep track of.
A World That Looks Too Healthy to Save
The show's eastern aesthetic, imperial grandeur and ambitions toward premium television have an unexpected side effect: Arkanar looks sterile and, in some ways, fairly stable. Half a season in, it is not entirely clear what makes this world decadent or what disaster it needs saving from. It displays a rich political life and steady dynastic succession, along with the torture that Lenta.ru notes no Dark Age has gone without, especially one that, according to the plot, has lasted only fifteen years. The piece asks whether RosAtom's intelligence was wrong, whether the Institute of History's staff fell for their own propaganda, or whether the earthlings are, in the tradition of House Atreides, simply in a hurry to colonize a hot planet.
Lenta.ru argues the absence of grime meant to signal the alien civilization's depravity is beside the point, since comparing the series to Alexei German's film, or comparing this broad-audience show to German's three-hour arthouse production, would be pointless regardless. Some sense of medieval bleakness does come through in details such as the king's rotting leg or Bezrukov's sun-beaten face. Historically, filmmakers wanting to show a world on the brink of inevitable, even necessary, destruction have had to resort to unflattering manipulations.
German's film is cited as one extreme of that kind of filmmaking; Lars von Trier's "Dogville" achieved a similarly misanthropic effect through entirely different means. German's film took thirteen years to make, while von Trier's, shot with minimal sets, took about six weeks. Lenta.ru adds that cruder techniques used by today's state television broadcasters remain available too, though resorting to them would require abandoning all self-respect.
What's Next for Arkanar
According to Lenta.ru, the show's writers have not yet settled on a final verdict for Arkanar, but given the series' fidelity to the spirit of the original novella, it seems unlikely the story will end up endorsing revolution by force on a less developed world. The piece notes that the phrase "hard to be a god" sits uncomfortably close to the idea of the "white man's burden", which is why giving the protagonist an alternate personal mission, the search for his father, looks like the right call by the writers. As for Arkanar itself, if it needs saving from anything, Lenta.ru suggests it may be from overzealous progressors rather than from itself.
