# An Ordinary Woman (2018)

> A respectable Moscow businesswoman and family matriarch secretly runs a brothel while her household crumbles around her.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/71138

## Facts

- Seasons: 2
- Episodes: 17
- Episode runtime: 43 min
- Status: Canceled
- Genres: drama, crime
- Created by: Denis Utochkin, Mariya Melenevskaya
- Network: TV-3, Premier
- Cast: Anna Mikhalkova, Evgeniy Grishkovec, Sasha Bortich, Elizaveta Kononova, Tatyana Dogileva, Mariya Andreeva, Julia Melnikova, Aglaya Tarasova
- TMDB rating: 7.3/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8561620/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: brisk
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: accessible
- Violence: moderate
- Tone: tense, claustrophobic, bleak, melodramatic, suspenseful

## Synopsis

An Ordinary Woman (2018-2021) is a Russian crime drama series created by Denis Utochkin and Mariya Melenevskaya for TV-3 and Premier. Anna Mikhalkova plays Marina, a polished businesswoman in her late thirties who seems to have the perfect life, with a surgeon husband, Artyom Lavrov, played by Evgeniy Grishkovets, and daughters attending elite schools. Beneath the surface she secretly runs a brothel, and her household is quietly falling apart: her husband keeps a mistress, her elder daughter dabbles in drug dealing, and her younger daughter shows troubling sociopathic streaks. The engine of the show is Marina's constant effort to keep the facade intact while managing her hidden business and the criminal pressures around it, with bratva influence and prostitution rings threatening to expose her. The series unfolds across two seasons and seventeen episodes of roughly forty-three minutes each, mixing domestic melodrama with crime-thriller tension in contemporary Moscow. Its tone is tense and claustrophobic, with a bleak undercurrent of moral compromise and a woman's struggle to control her own story. Fans of Breaking Bad, Ozark and Weeds will find resonance in its double-life premise and morally compromised female lead.

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