Six episodes, a Top 10 run in more than 60 countries and a rewrite that adds an investigation, new women and a different Rzecki: how Netflix’s Lalka reads Bolesław Prus’s 1890 novel about a merchant who could buy everything except a place in Warsaw society.

Stanisław Wokulski made a fortune so that one woman would look at him. Izabela Łęcka, the daughter of a Warsaw aristocrat who has run out of money but not out of contempt, is the reason he made it. That is the spine of Lalka, the 1890 novel by Bolesław Prus that every Polish student reads, and it is the spine of The Doll, the six-part series now streaming worldwide on Netflix. What the series does with that spine is the more interesting story: the director, Paweł Maślona, keeps Prus’s class divide and then builds new rooms around it.

A canonical novel, a contemporary reading

The series is a Polish-language production by Akson Studio, produced by Michał Kwieciński and Jan Kwieciński, and since its premiere on 16 September 2026 Netflix has presented it openly as a contemporary reinterpretation rather than a faithful costume piece. The platform’s own description calls it a period drama that mixes irony, the grotesque, humour, mystery and melodrama. It drops the romantic idealisation of the two leads and treats them as people caught in a web of social dependencies, bent by ambition and money. The line Netflix chose for its synopsis is blunt: in this world love is not enough, and every decision has a price.

That framing matters because Lalka is not just any classic. Prus, the pen name of the journalist Aleksander Głowacki, first published it in instalments in the Warsaw daily Kurier Codzienny between 1887 and 1889, before it appeared as a book in 1890. It is set in 1878 and 1879, in a city under Russian rule, and it is the most adapted novel of the Polish canon, a set text that generations of readers meet at school and keep arguing about for the rest of their lives.

What the novel is about

Wokulski is a merchant with no lineage. A veteran of the January Uprising of 1863 who was exiled to Siberia, he returns to Warsaw, marries the widow who owns a fancy-goods shop, and then multiplies his money as a supplier to the Russian army during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877 and 1878. Izabela has lineage and no money. Her father, Tomasz Łęcki, has run the family fortune into the ground, and the family’s place in the salons depends on keeping up appearances it can no longer pay for. The distance between those two positions is the whole tragedy.

Prus tells the story twice. Wokulski lives it forward, as a man trying to rise; his old shop clerk, Ignacy Rzecki, narrates it backward, in a diary that mourns a vanishing order and keeps faith with the Napoleonic legend of his youth. Around them the novel builds a cross-section of Warsaw: impoverished aristocrats, Jewish merchants such as Henryk Szlangbaum, a gambling baron, a young inventor called Julian Ochocki, a free-spirited widow, and a courtroom farce over a stolen toy that gives the book its title.

That title has always carried more than the lawsuit. Polish readers have argued for over a century that the doll is Izabela herself: a beautiful, ornamental figure onto whom men project their desire, admired precisely because she remains a surface. Naming the whole social machine after a toy is Prus’s quietest cruelty, and every adaptation has to decide whether Izabela is a victim of that reading or its knowing accomplice.

What Paweł Maślona changed

The series starts close to the book and then departs from it. According to its Polish Wikipedia entry, the first three episodes stay relatively close to Prus’s plot, while the last three build a much more personal version, dropping some characters and storylines and adding others. Netflix’s press material names the additions directly: an investigation, family secrets and conflicts that expose the characters’ hidden business interests. Polish coverage of the release has also reported that the series reworks the ending, which is why the adaptation has become a talking point at home, with Maślona answering critics of the changes in interviews.

Two shifts stand out on paper. Rzecki is no longer the elderly clerk tied to the past; the series makes him Wokulski’s friend and business partner, only slightly older than him and actively involved in his ventures. And Izabela gets a direction of her own. Netflix describes her as a young aristocrat with her own plans, and in the series she moves towards a circle of women gathered around the novelist Eliza Orzeszkowa and the emancipation magazine Bluszcz, both real fixtures of nineteenth-century Polish letters. A woman doctor modelled on a historical figure joins that circle to show how narrow women’s rights were at the time, and emancipation, understood as the right to decide for oneself, becomes one of the central themes.

That is a deliberate answer to the old question about the title. If the doll is Izabela, this version is interested in what happens when the doll wants something else.

A director who argues with the canon

The choice of director explains the approach. Paweł Maślona won the Golden Lions, the top prize at the Gdynia Film Festival, in 2023 for Kos, released internationally as Scarborn, a violent black comedy that reworked the national hero Tadeusz Kościuszko and that Polish critics read as an argument with national myth rather than a monument to it. His feature debut, Panic Attack, was an absurdist ensemble piece that diagnosed middle-class anxiety through farce. The mix of genres Netflix advertises for The Doll, from irony and the grotesque to mystery and melodrama, reads like a continuation of both films.

The writing credits point the same way. Maślona wrote the series with Paweł Demirski, a playwright known for confrontational stage reworkings of Polish history and its classics, and Jagoda Dutkiewicz. Behind the camera, the cinematographer is Paweł Flis, the production designer is Joanna Macha, the costume designer is Dorota Roqueplo, and the score comes from the Polish musician Baasch. The marketing set the tone early: the teaser released in February 2026 was cut to Radiohead’s Creep, an unusual choice for a story set in the 1870s.

Ballroom scene from the Netflix series The Doll — Photo: R. Pałka / Netflix

The cast of Poland’s most-filmed novel

Tomasz Schuchardt plays Wokulski, the role that anchors every screen version of the book, described by Netflix as a self-made man seeking a place among the elite. Sandra Drzymalska plays Izabela; she received a Polish Academy Award nomination for Jerzy Skolimowski’s EO and reached Netflix viewers through the comedy Sexify. Dariusz Chojnacki is Rzecki, Jacek Braciak plays Izabela’s bankrupt father, Tomasz Łęcki, and Julia Wyszyńska is Florentyna, the impoverished cousin.

The wider cast fills out Prus’s salons. Magdalena Cielecka plays Kazimiera Wąsowska, whom Netflix calls a charismatic icon of freedom; Piotr Adamczyk is Baron Krzeszowski; Piotr Pacek is Kazimierz Starski, a decadent opportunist; Mateusz Król plays Ochocki; Małgorzata Hajewska-Krzysztofik is the elderly Zasławska; and Agnieszka Grochowska plays Eliza Orzeszkowa. Maria Kania plays Marianna, a working-class woman who becomes close to Izabela, one of the characters through which the series widens Prus’s view beyond the drawing rooms.

Shot across Poland’s palaces

Principal photography began on 1 July 2025. The production used Nieborów Palace, Szajnocha Street in Wrocław, the Karol Poznański Palace in Łódź, the castle at Łańcut, the old town of Lublin and Krakowskie Przedmieście in Warsaw, the street where Prus placed Wokulski’s shop. The six episodes run between 60 and 72 minutes each, which gives the story roughly six and a half hours, far more room than any feature film has had to tell it.

The adaptations it has to answer

Every Polish viewer carries an earlier version. Wojciech Has’s 1968 film, with Mariusz Dmochowski as Wokulski and Beata Tyszkiewicz as Izabela, and Ryszard Ber’s 1977 television serial, with Jerzy Kamas and Małgorzata Braunek, fixed how these characters look and sound for generations. Reworking a text that already has canonical screen versions is a different job from adapting an unfilmed book: the new one has to argue with the old, and changing the plot is the clearest form that argument can take.

The autumn of 2026 also brings a second, rival version. The novel is in the public domain, and a separate theatrical feature directed by Maciej Kawalski, with Marcin Dorociński as Wokulski and Kamila Urzędowska as Izabela, was dated for Polish cinemas on 30 September, two weeks after the series. Urzędowska played Jagna in The Peasants, the hand-painted 2023 adaptation of Władysław Reymont’s novel, so the season links Poland’s two great nineteenth-century novels on screen even more tightly.

Why Netflix wanted Prus

For the platform, the logic is plain. A love story that is really an argument about money is legible in any market where money arrives faster than acceptance, and the early numbers suggest the bet paid off. According to Netflix’s Top 10 charts, The Doll reached No. 1 in Poland, entered the US Top 10 in its first week and appeared in the national Top 10 of more than 60 countries. For a six-episode, Polish-language period drama built on a school text, that is a wide reach, and it explains why European canon keeps turning up on the platform’s slate. The six episodes are available in Polish, with subtitles and dubbing across the platform’s markets.

What the courtship still cannot answer

The question the series inherits is the one Prus built the romance to leave open. Wokulski can buy proximity to Izabela’s world; he cannot buy membership of it, and the novel never lets him forget the difference. Whether a self-made man can be admitted by a class that needs his money and despises its source is a question 1879 Warsaw could not settle. By giving Izabela her own ambitions and Rzecki a stake in the business, Maślona’s version asks it from more than one side. Whether that reading persuades viewers who grew up with the book is exactly the argument the series has started in Poland, and it is the right argument for an adaptation of Lalka to provoke.

Tags: Netflix, Tomasz Schuchardt, Sandra Drzymalska, The Doll, Bolesław Prus, Paweł Maślona