Leslye Headland, the co-creator of the new comedy Russian Doll on Netflix, is perhaps our sharpest dramatic writer when it comes to cruelty. Headland, who created the series with Amy Poehler and the actress Natasha Lyonne (who also stars in the show and co-wrote several episodes), got her start as a playwright in the mid-2000s, when her main preoccupation was misbehavior—the spiky words and blithe, callous actions that lead people to hurt others and resent themselves, the little, daily snips and slights that we stay up at night replaying in our heads, wondering what we might have done differently.

Beginning in 2007, Headland decided to write seven contemporary plays, based on the seven deadly sins, as a way of exploring our worst tendencies. Her sin play cycle, beginning with Cinephilia, her exploration of “lust,” in which a Brooklyn couple stays up late debating movies and sex and also nearly clawing one other’s eyes out, is a triumph of vulgarity and pettiness and prickly human emotions. There are characters in Headland’s early work that show vulnerability and yearning, but they are swiftly punished or turned into punchlines.

There are characters in Headland’s early work that show vulnerability and yearning, but they are swiftly punished or turned into punchlines.

Perhaps this is most apparent in Bachelorette, her razor-edged 2010 “gluttony” play, which later became a criminally underrated 2012 feature film, directed by Headland and starring Kirsten Dunst, Isla Fisher, and Lizzy Caplan as a trio of drug-addled, selfish, body-dysmorphic, alcoholic, miserable millennial harridans, determined to sabotage their most earnest friend’s wedding day. Bachelorette, the film, did not get as much attention as Bridesmaids, which came out a year earlier and had its share of blue jokes but ultimately embraced its characters with a gentle, gooey hug. Bachelorette, on the other hand, slaps its protagonists across the face with an open palm. It sends them into spirals of self-loathing and catty desperation (nearly every character in the film has some sort of eating disorder; much of the female bonding takes place around vomiting in a bathroom stall) and pumps its main trio full of cocaine and champagne which leads to unforgivable mishaps, like ripping their friend’s wedding dress to shreds the night before the ceremony. Writing about the play when it debuted in 2010, a New York Times critic put it this way: “the fun of being young, comfortable and playfully wasted begins to bleed into a life of stunted drifting, frustration and wanton self-destruction.”

Wanton self-destruction is the backbone of Russian Doll, which turns the concept literal: Its protagonist willfully self-immolates, over and over, in the most dramatic way possible. In other words, she keeps dying. Lyonne plays Nadia, a droll, chain-smoking New Yorker with a wild tangle of red hair, who is caught in a Groundhog Day-esque loop on the night of her 36th birthday party. The first episode follows her through her first death: She starts her night sighing into a gilded mirror in a sleek, black-tiled bathroom that looks like it could belong in Studio 54. Somewhere in the distance, Harry Nilsson’s jangly “Gotta Get Up” starts playing, and we hear a cacophony of muddled voices, a sign that merriment is taking place right outside the bathroom. When Nadia emerges, she surveys the large crowd, who have gathered together at her friend Maxine’s cavernous apartment (a converted Yeshiva in the East Village, the height of moneyed, bohemian chic). The guests are all there to celebrate her, but Nadia doesn’t seem to appreciate this fact, or even seem interested in attending her own party. She floats toward Maxine (the kookily dry Greta Lee, swaddled in crystals and velvet choker necklaces), who is basting a chicken in the kitchen and smoking an “Israeli joint,” laced with cocaine. “Sweet birthday baby!” Maxine exclaims (a phrase that begins to lose meaning as you hear it again, and again, and again, throughout the series). Nadia rolls her eyes. Mostly, she seems agitated by the fact that she has to interact with people for the night.

Lyonne’s strongest muscles as an actress are sardonic detachment and antsy discomfort, and she flexes both in full force in these early scenes. Instead of enjoying her fête, Nadia does several shots and desperately skulks around the room hunting for someone to leave with. She finally lands on a misogynist blowhard professor named Mike (Jeremy Bobb). She drags him first to a bodega, and then back to her own apartment a few blocks away for mediocre sex until she grows bored and kicks him out. What we learn from these brief scenes is that Nadia has a severe block when it comes to human connections. She is a devout loner, a woman who prefers the solitude of the bathroom mirror to a party, who blots out her nights with anonymous sex and obliterating substances, whose default settings are caustic and surly. Lyonne is not a wispy mover; she is lead-footed, walking with a slightly bowlegged, clomping gait that can make her look like a dizzy marionette. She is a brilliant physical comedian, the kind that a silent film director might have called a real scamp. Her heavy body language reaffirms Nadia’s internal weight; she’s carrying around a lot of baggage, dragging it behind her everywhere she goes like an invisible carcass.