There is a kind of comedy that keeps being right by accident. It gathers a cast of vain, self-deluding fools, invites you to laugh at them, and then, somewhere around the third episode, you realize the joke was never about the fools. It was about the machine that hands them power and calls the result freedom. That is the trick the Polish series 1670 has been pulling from its first scene, and its new season sharpens the blade.

For anyone arriving new, the premise is simple and the execution is not. 1670 is a mockumentary set in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, shot as if a documentary crew had somehow wandered into a 17th-century manor and started collecting talking-head confessions. Its subject is Jan Pawel Adamczewski (Bartlomiej Topa), a middling nobleman convinced he is destined to become the most famous man in Poland, and the szlachta world of privilege, feuds and ceremony he presides over. On Netflix it became the platform’s breakout Polish comedy, the rare subtitled sitcom that crossed borders on word of mouth rather than marketing.

The returning season does not reintroduce any of that, and it is right not to. Its interest is in escalation. Where the first two seasons kept Jan Pawel’s delusions penned inside his village of Adamczycha, the third lets them loose on a bigger stage. After the harvest, Jan Pawel sets out to prove himself a true homo sarmaticus, a real man of the Sarmatian nobility, and travels to the royal court to study power at its source. The world widens from the manor to Warsaw and the open road, and the show’s makers have said the register darkens with it, closer to the colder, sharper first season than the broader second.

The reason the widening works is the same reason the show worked in the first place, and it is worth naming because it is easy to lose under the wigs and the mud. 1670 is built on a formal joke, the impossible documentary camera, that its cast play with total sincerity. Bartlomiej Topa delivers Jan Pawel’s confessions to that lens the way a modern politician delivers a doorstep monologue, certain of his own reasonableness and oblivious to what is actually being recorded. Nobody winks. The comedy comes from conviction rather than mugging, and because the period surface is played straight, the satire underneath is free to cut.

What keeps 1670 from being a costume sketch is its target. The Commonwealth it mocks ran on what its nobility proudly called Golden Liberty, a cherished bundle of aristocratic freedoms, and on the liberum veto, the parliamentary rule that let a single deputy collapse an entire assembly simply by shouting his objection. The show treats the veto as a running gag, and the gag keeps landing because the mechanism is not safely dead. A system in which any one member can bring the whole enterprise to a halt in the name of individual freedom is not a 17th-century curiosity. It is the recognizable grammar of a great deal of modern politics, and 1670 lets you laugh at the szlachta before quietly handing you the mirror.

This is where the series earns its place in a longer tradition, and where it rewards a viewer who knows the neighborhood. Polish comedy has been dismantling official self-importance for more than half a century, since Marek Piwowski’s Rejs turned a river cruise into a parody of committee culture and Stanislaw Bareja’s Mis made the empty procedures of the state into a national in-joke. 1670 inherits that instinct for the absurdity of systems and marries it to the deadpan confessional grammar the English-speaking world knows from The Office and What We Do in the Shadows. What it adds is period. By dressing the mockumentary in Sarmatian silk, the nobility’s proud fantasy that they descended from ancient warriors, the show makes the form do something genuinely new: the costumes insist this is the distant past, and every talking head insists it is not.

It helps that the show has always known exactly how much history to carry. The jokes never require a seminar; the liberum veto arrives as a man ruining everyone’s day and only afterward, if you care to notice, as a real constitutional catastrophe that helped paralyze and eventually partition a European power. That lightness of touch is why 1670 travels. A viewer in Madrid or Manila who has never heard of Sarmatism still recognizes the type: the local grandee who confuses his comfort with the common good, the meeting that one stubborn man can detonate, the family that treats inherited status as personal achievement.

The season keeps its ensemble intact, which matters for a show whose comedy is cumulative rather than episodic. Martyna Byczkowska’s Aniela, the daughter who reads and the one member of the household paying real attention to the world, founds a school for the village’s peasants this season as an actual answer to their suffering, and she remains the show’s conscience. Michal Sikorski’s Jakub, the son who became a priest, sharpens his conflict with his father into something with real edges. Katarzyna Herman’s Zofia does the opposite of her husband: she says less and means more, and this season her marriage to Jan Pawel cools, opening the kind of gap the mockumentary camera loves to sit inside. Around them, Andrzej Klak’s Andrzej works to stir conflict wherever he can find it.

The absurdist register stretches further than ever, as far as a peasant seriously contemplating a journey to the moon, but the show never lets the silliness float free of the point. Every joke is tethered to a simple question about who holds power and who does not. The peasants of Adamczycha are the ground on which the nobles perform, and the third season is more willing than the second to let their suffering register as suffering, which is what the creators mean when they say it plays darker. The laughs are still there; they simply cost a little more.

There is a production story underneath all this worth noting, because it explains why the show can afford to get stranger rather than safer. 1670 is the clearest evidence Netflix has that a densely local, subtitled comedy can become a global title without sanding off what makes it local. The platform greenlit the third season before the second had even aired, a vote of confidence that let the writers plan an arc rather than a patch. Nothing about the result feels engineered for export; if anything, the specificity is the selling point, the opposite of the flavorless four-quadrant product the streaming era is usually accused of manufacturing.

A priest wielding a mallet in 1670 season 3 — Photo: Robert Palka / Netflix

That is the tension the third season refuses to resolve, and it is right to refuse. A comedy this precise about institutional failure raises a question it cannot answer from inside its own frame: whether naming the absurdity of a system does anything at all to change it, or whether the laughter is simply the most bearable way to keep living with it. 1670 is certain the szlachta will not reform. It suspects we recognize the feeling. It declines, wisely, to tell us what to do with the recognition.

1670 returns for its third season on Netflix on 5 August 2026, with the full ensemble back and the same creative team behind it, writer and creator Jakub Ruzyllo and directors Maciej Buchwald and Kordian Kadziela, produced by Akson Studio for Netflix. The first two seasons are streaming now, and they are the recommended way in, because the joke, as ever, is cumulative: the longer you watch these people insist on their own importance, the funnier and the sadder the insistence becomes.