Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner gave a telling interview recently, in which he was asked about the lavish, expensive feel of his new series The Romanoffs (Amazon Prime). “It was a wildest-dreams scenario,” he said, adding that, although the budget isn’t quite Game of Thrones or Westworld-level, “I did say: ‘These are the things I would like to do that I couldn’t do on Mad Men.’”
The result is The Romanoffs – long, starry, shot on three continents and with a bank-busting soundtrack of very famous bands. It is an anthology series, its eight standalone episodes loosely tied together by the idea that its characters either are or believe they are direct descendants of Nicholas II. It’s all wrapped up in some overarching notions about collapsing identity, a simultaneous fear and embrace of the status quo, and change marching on regardless.
On the basis of the patience-testing first two episodes, released together (the six that follow will come out weekly), The Romanoffs makes a convincing case for someone pulling in the reins of the untameable auteurs of television. The first, The Violet Hour, is a curious, Woody Allen-in-Europe sort of caper about a racist old aristocrat in Paris permanently on the verge of death, and her nephew’s attempts to stay in her good books so he can inherit her grand apartment. She is softened by the arrival of a Muslim care assistant who, Magical Negro-style, ignores her employer’s foul behaviour and decides to see the best side of her, in order for her employer to grow as a person. It is cloyingly whimsical.
The second episode, The Royal We, follows a couple through marriage counselling and outside of it, where they betray each other out of frustration and boredom garnished with a damp fizz of violence. Both episodes are unforgivably slight realisations of their stories, considering each is around 90 minutes long, and anyone hoping for an unexpected twist will be disappointed.
If these early episodes do set the tone for what will follow, then they suggest The Romanoffs will not reward the commitment it demands. We are being asked to spend a lot of time in these people’s company, and while that is no reason for them to be likable, it should require that they are at least convincingly awful enough to sustain our interest. Too often there is a sense that there is a better character not quite realised, though it would be hard to pin this on the performances. Marthe Keller and Inès Melab in The Violet Hour, and Kerry Bishé in The Royal We, flesh out what they’ve been given with real heart, and there are bigger names to come, with an Isabelle Huppert/Christina Hendricks episode offering a compelling reason to stick at it.
What’s most frustrating about The Romanoffs is that there was clearly the potential for a decent show here, if it could have shed a few pounds of blubber and been given a stern talking to. In this case, bigger is not better, and it simply didn’t need to be so unwieldy and untamed. At its best, it tells honest stories about human weakness with wit and understatement. Its undoing is the fact that it can’t resist overstatement. On a cruise ship, in The Royal We, we hear a talk from a writer, played by John Slattery, explaining Russian history to a room full of modern-day Romanovs: “That’s your heritage – some combination of the grandiose and the terrified.” It stands as a neat summary of the show.
