Netflix’s international slate has become a reliable place to find strong dramas, and Poland seems to be building its own solid track record. The country has already given the streamer 1670, a comedy that found an audience through word of mouth, alongside a steady stream of darker crime stories. But Polish television hasn’t often tackled the kind of large-scale, true-events historical drama that made HBO’s Chernobyl so compelling, where one catastrophic event exposes the failures of an entire system.
Netflix’s latest project looks like it could be aiming for something similar. The streamer has set a December global premiere for The Riot, a six-episode drama based on the largest prison uprising in postwar Europe, and the first trailer suggests it could be a little more ambitious than a typical historical thriller.
In December 1989, months after the country’s first partially free elections ended communist rule, the new government passed an amnesty that freed thousands of prisoners. The catch was that plenty of inmates fell outside its terms, and for men watching the whole nation celebrate liberation on television while their own circumstances stayed exactly the same, the exclusion landed like a provocation. Revolts tore through multiple facilities, with the uprising at Czarne becoming the bloodiest of them.
The series fictionalizes this as Mroki prison and frames the explosion through two men with a shared history. Borys Szyc, one of Poland’s most recognizable actors, plays a convict known as Reagan who leads the inmates, while Filip Pławiak plays Janek Chmielewski, a rising politician and Reagan’s former cellmate who finds himself negotiating from the other side of the wall. Netflix’s official synopsis sets the tone pretty efficiently:
“December 1989, Poland. Everyone is celebrating freedom and change. Everyone except those behind bars. For them, change is only a promise, and hope turns out to be the most dangerous weapon of all. Because when you take it away, a riot is born. The same riot that will put two former cellmates on opposite sides of the bars, trying to prevent a massacre.”
The trailer opens with a prisoner confronting the politician directly. “I saw you on TV. So now you just walk into prison whenever you feel like it, right? Yet you keep us in here like cattle.” That arguably captures the show’s thesis: a revolution can be real and still leave entire categories of people behind. Netflix has also been pushing a third perspective in its materials: a prison psychologist played by Anita Szepelska who tries to reform the system from inside it, which hints the series wants moral texture rather than a simple cops-versus-convicts standoff.
Behind the camera, directing duties were split between Mateusz Rakowicz, who handled episodes 1, 2, 4 and 5, and Marek Lechki on episodes 3 and 6, working from scripts by Łukasz Bluszcz and Marcin Kubawski. Maciej Kubicki of Telemark produces, and the supporting cast includes Jacek Poniedziałek, Rafał Maćkowiak, and rapper Wini, among others. The Riot premieres globally on Netflix on Dec. 9, 2026.
