In November 2015, for the first time since Evening Quarter started, the show is not aired on Ukrainian television. The audience is worried. Some suspect chicanery on the part of the disgruntled President Petro Poroshenko’s team. In fact, it is a publicity stunt: a week later, the 1+1 channel broadcasts the first episode of a new series, Servant of the People, with Volodymyr Zelensky in the title role.

Scriptwriter Borys Shefir recalls that back in Moscow, the 95th Quarter television production company once came up with an idea for a comedy talk show: to gather a group of witty individuals who have nothing to do with politics and to ask them what they would do if they suddenly found themselves in government.