Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Whiskey On The Rocks’ On Hulu, A Dramedy Based On The Real-Life Story Of A Soviet Sub Running Aground In Sweden

If you weren’t alive back in the early 1980s, you have no idea how tense things were in the decades-long cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union. It seemed that any minor disagreement could escalate into a world-destroying nuclear conflagration. A new series on Hulu takes a look at one such minor disagreement that happened in 1981, but does so with a comedic twist.

WHISKEY ON THE ROCKS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “OCTOBER, 1981.” After a brief treatise on the Cold War climate at the time, we see, we see a submarine running along the water’s surface in the dead of night. “U 137 (S 363), Heading for Kaliningrad, USSR.”

The Gist: Lieutenant Dimitrij Tarasenko (Oskar Vygonovski), a KGB agent who is the sub’s political officer, is toasting the birth of his daughter with some milk. Captain Vladimir Peskov (Andrius Bialobzeskis) comes in and tells Tarasenko that “the meaning of life is daughters.” He also authorizes that the crew party with all the vodka they have hidden around their quarters. He also orders the sub to change course to Klaipėda, the lieutenant’s hometown, so he can start a parental leave.

As the crew gets drunker and drunker, the navigator sets a course, but the only sober crewmember can’t really read the coordinates he wrote down, so he takes his best guess. Instead of heading east, the sub turns north, out of Soviet waters, and runs aground on the Sewedish shore, not far from the Karlskrona naval base.

In the meantime, fisherman brothers, Gustav and Harry Jansson (Rolf Lydahl, Per Ragnar) hear a loud noise near their shoreline home, but don’t think much of it. When Gustav goes to see what’s in their nets the next morning, he sees the Soviet sub. He tries to call the office of Swedish prime minister Thorbjörn Fälldin (Rolf Lassgård), but he rambles so much the receptionist blows him off. Harry encourages him to call the local newspaper.

Also in the meantime, word of the mistake is making its way to the leaders of the two major superpowers. In Moscow, General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev (Kestutis Stasys Jakstas), angrily tries to figure out how to get the sub out of the mess they created, though his failing mental health makes him think in circles. In the United States, President Ronald Reagan (Mark Noble) gets briefed on the situation, interrupting a Camp David retreat to go back to Washington.

Photo: Hulu

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Das Boot except with a sense of humor.

Our Take: Henrik Jansson-Schweizer based Whiskey On The Rocks on a real-life standoff between the USSR and Sweden over the Soviet sub’s accidental sojourn into Swedish waters. It was definitely seen by the Swedes as an aggressive move by the Soviets, and it was dubbed “Whiskey on the rocks” because the sub that ran aground was a Whiskey-class vessel.

But Jansson-Schweizer takes what could have been a very serious Cold War tale and turns it on its ear, making the incident a product of a drunken crew and making the various world leaders involved in the negotiations into the caricatures they were portrayed as at the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.

We’ll get to that last statement in a second. But we want to cite a scene in the first episode where we linger on the Jansson brothers, who bicker like a married couple, having coffee and biscuits after a long day. The slurping and crunching of the two old men are emphasized, showing just how boring their everyday existences really are. That’s the kind of tone this show takes, despite the serious incident at its center.

It’s why showing Reagan as a warmongering cowboy, Brezhnev as a drunk with a failing memory and Fälldin as a guy who is nonchalant and passive makes sense in this context. And we appreciate that the actors playing these world leaders aren’t trying to do impressions of them; nothing is more cliched than someone doing an impression of Ronald Reagan. The problem is that Mark Noble doesn’t come close to passing as Reagan, and his British accent seeps through some of his diaglogue. Given that the series will concentrate a lot on the negotiations among the three leaders, that’s going to be a big distraction.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Rolf Lydahl and Per Lasson, who play the Jansson brothers, just for the slurping and crunching scene.

Most Pilot-y Line: Reagan shoots skeet that has the face of Brezhnev on them. That’s a bit on the nose, isn’t it?

Our Call: STREAM IT. While it’s not hilarious, Whiskey On The Rocks succeeds in putting a tense Cold War standoff into a lighter context, 44 years after the fact.

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.