Urszula Pawlak was looking for a weather forecast when her television landed on the wrong regional channel. Instead, she found “Borrowed Hour”, a comedy-drama about two fictional Ukrainian towns negotiating how to share power for one evening. Six weeks later, the series has drawn 3.9 million viewing accounts across broadcaster KoloVyd and its streaming service, Hushka.
The 48-year-old Lviv stationery-shop owner had never heard of the show. She watched the whole episode, then sent its channel a message asking when the next one would air. That note reached the small production team behind a programme that had been given a late slot and little promotion.
The viewer who tuned in by chance
“I thought it was going to be another serious lecture about electricity,” Pawlak said in an interview. “Then the two mayors started arguing over whether the bakery or the town hall should get the last hour of power. I wanted to know who would win.”
KoloVyd moved the series to a prime-time Sunday slot after staff noticed a cluster of similar messages from viewers who had stumbled across it. The season finale, shown on 4 October, reached 1.28 million same-day viewers on television and streaming, according to figures supplied by the broadcaster. Its first episode had drawn 176,000.
The show’s brisk, six-episode format puts rival town councils around one table, with each episode ending in a practical bargain: a bakery gets its ovens, a clinic keeps its lights, or a village water pump runs before dawn. The electricity shortage is a plot device, but the arguments are recognisable to viewers used to local councils balancing competing needs.
“People are tired of being told they must choose between a useful story and a funny one,” said Daniel Lippmaa, KoloVyd’s commissioning editor. The network spent ₴8.6 million (about €172,000) on the first season, filmed over 24 days in a converted Kyiv office building. The modest budget left the writers relying on dialogue rather than elaborate sets.
A small set, a wider audience
The format was designed for short episodes that viewers could follow on a phone or a television. Each runs 24 minutes, with a recap at the start and a simple map showing which fictional neighbourhood has power. Streaming viewers can also vote on which town’s proposal they consider fair; the result appears after the credits, not in the plot.
Leiu Ngao Mokhtar, a media researcher at the fictional Kyiv-based Screen Measure Centre, said the show had benefited from viewers sharing recommendations rather than clips. “It gives people a compact argument to have at breakfast,” she said. The most common vote so far has backed a shared schedule for a town’s bakery and water pump.
KoloVyd has ordered a second season of eight episodes for next spring, with writers testing stories about a shared greenhouse and a village school’s heating schedule. Pawlak has been invited to a studio recording as a guest of the production team. She says she will take the same seat in front of her television when the new episodes arrive.
