The Romanoffs Review

Getting into a good anthology show can be satisfying but also undermine the reason I want to use my time budget on TV instead of movies or other forms of passive entertainment. Television is an opportunity to follow a story as it unfolds over several distinct episodes. Instead, an anthology with little strain of connection can feel like I’m watching a lot of abridged movies without the satisfaction of being able to tally it up towards the list of films I watched (I’m a film nerd like that, don’t judge). In short, even if a series has state-of-the-art storytelling, it’s the connective tissue that makes an anthology feel worthwhile.

“The Romanoffs” tells a series of extremely long vignettes of disparate parties who are related to one another through shared lineage to the famed Romanoff dynasty.  One of the keys to this connectivue tissue is the very en vogue idea of white privilege expanded to look at a sort of aristocratic privilege that intersects with history in a very interesting way as it relates to the Romanoff family.

The Romanovs (Weiner chose to name the substitute the "ff" in place of the "v" to connote phoniness) were gunned down at the end of the Bolshevik revolution in uncertain enough terms that many people (most notably Anastasia) have claimed to be descendants of the royal family. In an interview, Weiner discussed the show as one "about people who used to be great."

He expands a little more:

In a weird way, it used to be completely untraceable and you could brag your way into a kind of status, especially in the United States, where there is no royalty.

There was a guy who ran a restaurant here in Los Angeles called Romanoffs, which was a big Hollywood hangout, and he claimed to be related to the family but was not. There are 200,000 people in Russia alone who have this last name. It’s not like everyone in the family was killed that day, but the number of people who claim to be from this family and the number of people who actually are is a bit disparate. But we all have that when we go looking for our roots, right? The things these stories have in common is that they’re about inheritance and adoption—am I special, am I adopted. 

In one of the episodes the false allure of dynasty is treated literally: Andrew Rannells plays a shifty piano teacher who, in fact, steals the Romanoff story from one of his clients.

The individual stories are pretty unacceptably long (see previous complaint about not wanting to watch full-length movies that don’t count as full-length movies) but they are all uniformly of a very high caliber so far and that’s very hard to pull off. None of them rely on soft comedy (of the kind that creates so much categorization confusion at the Golden Globes). They all hook you very early on with conflict that’s easily readable but elusive enough to elicit curiosity and draws you in through a loose foreshadowing. 

If the episodes start off strong, their undoing is often their ending. It was initially tempting to write that this series is similar to the “Twilight Zone” or “Black Mirror” in that the stories rely on twists but there’s quite a range here. The first three episodes play out well along those parameters with sharp turns at the end that shape the meaning of the story and justify the decisions to stick it out to the end. After, that, however, we have an episode with Amanda Peete that feels like the natural conclusion to the story. The Radha Mitchell episode set in Mexico City ends on a bit of a fourth wall break as a number of historical figures march across the plaza like "Chariots of Fire." It seems like in this case, that there was a void where the twist should have gone.  The Andrew Rannells story (one that is often cited as the worst episode of the series), the twist is a moral step backwards and leaves us with a sense of dissonance as it fades to the credits. The last episode I saw (with Kathyn Hahn) didn’t have as much of a twist so much as but a visual cue (the husband making eye contact with the unfortunate baby they rejected for adoption) is a potent image that allows us to foreshadow what’s to come.

As someone who’s seen very little “Mad Men”, I’m struck by the power of the story telling both on the script and in the visual language. The running times are unacceptably long which strained nearly every story but there’s a worthy seed of ambition in nearly every episode. The only outliar on the ambition front is the Amanda Peete episode where a stressed-out single mother mulls over whether or not to reveal her true birth father to her daughter. The episode has a great sense of tense energy for such a mundane set of events, but it seems like the sole outliar in terms of being about something bigger.

One of the great ways to interact with the show is to look for the historic easter eggs. Here are two great guides by Refinery29 and The Week,