Bolji život (Serbian Cyrillic: Бољи живот, English: A Better Life) is a Yugoslav TV series with mixed elements of soap opera, comedy and drama that aired from 1987 to 1991.
The story revolves around the Popadić family and works through their personal struggles as well as their adaptation to the rapid political and economic changes taking place in the post-Tito SFR Yugoslavia during the late 1980s and early 1990s.
Giga Moravac is a fiftysomething impulsive and outburst-prone administrator, employed as middle manager at the legal department of an unnamed state-owned company that produces unspecified product(s).
His cultured and delicate wife Emilija Konstantinović—who comes from an affluent and highbrow Belgrade family of a pre-World War II state monopoly senior inspector (viši inspektor državnog monopola) in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia government administration—teaches Latin at a high school.
It stipulates that each of her brother's kids stands to inherit YUD20 million (~US$43,000) under specific conditions: Saša has to find a job, Violeta has to get married and celebrate a one-year anniversary, while Boba has to complete his final year of high school with at least a 4 (very good) grade average.
Numerous rejections are starting to affect his self-confidence and he is beginning to feel inadequate in front of Branka who had graduated medicine with top marks the same year he did, but, unlike him, right away got hired for a cardiologist position that she is now excelling at.
His atrocious performance in school brings both Giga and Ema, on separate occasions to discuss matters and work out a game plan with Boba's home room professor Dušan "Terminator" Marković.
Though she is ecstatic, Filip is not thrilled with the development and is especially unhappy about the celebrated theater actor and multiple divorcee Baron now wooing his girlfriend, with Viki even welcoming the aging lothario's smooth advances.
It all culminates in an act of madness as he breaks into Baron's apartment with a gun, threatening to kill him, but the verbose actor talks him out of it using a combination of pointed eloquence and dramatic flair.
Finally, everything is ironed out and the civil ceremony takes place in front of the two sets of families, including Giga and Ema, Viki and Baron (now an official item), and drunken Boba.
Though the production is largely shambolic, she catches the eye of an amorous Italian director who begins showering her with attention, praise, and vague promises right in front of jealous Baron.
Viki soon leaves for Rome to join her new Italian beau while her parents Giga and Ema's marriage is close to disintegration with contentious discovery session at the divorce court and requests for Terminator as well as Dara's husband to come in and provide testimony.
[1] The female lead role of Ema Popadić, however, was first offered to Vera Čukić who rejected it at which point someone within the production team suggested Svetlana Bojković who accepted.
[1][2] Furthermore, Pavić wrote the role of the main family's oldest son Aleksandar Popadić specifically for twenty-seven-year-old Žarko Laušević who eventually had to drop out due to commitments on a movie he had been shooting.
The role of the middle sibling, daughter Viki Popadić, was originally offered to twenty-six-year-old Ena Begović who reportedly rejected it due to wanting to focus on her theatrical work.
[1] The femme fatale role of the kafana singer Nina Andrejević who becomes the object of Boba Popadić's infatuation and desire was initially offered to the twenty-six-year-old Yugoslav folk superstar Lepa Brena who had already appeared in an earlier Pavić production, feature film Tesna koža, five years prior.
In fall 2011, twenty years after Bolji život stopped airing, the recognizability of Marko Nikolić and Svetlana Bojković, the actors who portrayed the main Popadić couple, was still such that the Agrokor-owned supermarket chain Idea hired them for a Serbian-market television commercial, which they did in character as Giga Moravac and Ema and partly shot in the original apartment where the series was taped.
[3][4] In December 2011, the two appeared as guests for an entire episode of Veče sa Ivanom Ivanovićem, the most-watched television talk show in Serbia, where they mostly discussed Bolji život.
[7][8] On 5 November 2012, it started rerunning it to record ratings in the country despite airing in the same time slot opposite Turkish first-run soap opera Muhteşem Yüzyıl about Suleyman the Magnificent on the rival RTL Televizija.