Spoilers ahead for the first season of “Russian Doll.”

In the summer of 1988, a violent clash occurred in the East Village between New York City police officers and counterculture protesters fighting a proposed curfew for the neighborhood’s Tompkins Square Park. After three years of off-and-on conflict, the city temporarily shut down the park in 1991.

In the new Netflix series “Russian Doll,” a violent clash occurs between Nadia (Natasha Lyonne), an East Village woman who keeps reliving the night of her 36th birthday, and her own lingering traumas stemming from an unstable childhood. In one episode she wanders through Tompkins Square Park at night, looking for her lost cat.

For the New York Times critic Jason Zinoman, the connection between the Tompkins Square Park riots of three decades ago and “Russian Doll” is clear. As he wrote in a Twitter thread on Monday, he views the show as “an against the grain meditation on the cultural guilt” around the disturbances that exacerbated tensions between community residents and law enforcement: