The Romanoffs

"The Violet Hour" is an elegant and surprising love story, while "The Royal We" is a sour disappointment. But the best news: A Matthew Weiner show is back on TV.

The three Romanoffs episodes sent for review all run feature-length. Those episodes are sweet, beautiful to look at, very sincere, kinda dopey: neither armageddon nor second coming.

The most salient detail I can share about all of these episodes is that they’re all at least 15 minutes too long. ... Still, the qualities that made Mad Men so good are present here, if buried a bit beneath all the excess.

The first three suggest it can comfortably hold a wide range of stories and tones, albeit with flaws.

By layering his new series with the weighty significance of the Romanoff history, Weiner fuels that same narrative fire [as Mad Men]. Anushka’s insecure boasting, Michael’s restless longing for satisfaction on his own terms, and the strange and incisive take in the third episode (currently under embargo, but the best of the bunch) are areas in which Weiner excels. Even when they’re maddening--and they are more often than not--they feel startlingly, painfully real.

There’s something potent there, something fundamentally Weiner-esque. But it just doesn’t connect in these three episodes. And so the show mirrors its characters in yet another way: It falls short of those which came before it.

The first two episodes are content to operate on perhaps two levels simultaneously, where Mad Men rarely settled for less than five, and the third episode is a satirical horror movie that plays like an unholy fusion of The Shining, Roman Polanski’s Repulsion, and François Truffaut’s film-about-filmmaking Day for Night. ... If the first episodes are representative, The Romanoffs is looser and more relaxed than Mad Men in ways that both please and frustrate.

[The Romanoffs] comes across as a work of simultaneously boundless artistic ambition and ego, a project capable of amazing and infuriating.

We get three long hauls that mostly test a viewer’s endurance. The performances aren’t at fault, but the stories themselves easily could be trimmed to an hour apiece or less. Left free to indulge himself, Weiner gorges too much on empty calories.

They’re fables, not operas--undeveloped vignettes with plot twists that slam the door on ambiguity. Neither of the stories [“The Violet Hour” and “The Royal We”] was fully satisfying, but both had moments of eerie beauty. ... [The third episode, “House of Special Purpose” is] a spooky, gamy, kinky story that felt like a lesser “Black Mirror.”

Amazon’s new series--the first time the streaming service has elected to release a show in weekly portions--is extravagant and ambitious, intermittently brilliant and baffling.

The Romanoffs asks a lot of viewers, with far-flung narratives that lack tonal consistency from episode to episode.

Three extremely uneven installments (all that were made available for review). ... The first, the very bad “The Violet Hour,” reveals itself to be a toothless and deeply unappealing romantic comedy. ... The second episode, the decent-by-comparison “The Royal We.” ... That third episode--the only one made available to me that I would describe as “good.”

The first three installments are eclectic, sometimes beguiling and each, in a different way, ultimately frustrating.

An opulent enterprise often eliciting little more than a head-scratching "Is that all there is" after these over-long vignettes. The tone shifts gears from a trite tale of martial stagnation and temptation from the John Cheever playbook to a more successful attempt to evoke The Twilight Zone's Rod Sterling in a surreal and disorienting "House of Special Purpose." [15-28 Oct 2018, p.8]

In show-business terms, The Romanoffs certainly conveys its pedigree. But like so many who have claimed that royal lineage, the result turns out to be pretty pedestrian.

At nearly 90 minutes apiece, episodes of The Romanoffs play together like a nice long weekend at an independent film festival in the mountains somewhere. Enjoy them with a glass of something dry and white, and don’t expect to be blown away by what you discover.

Amazon’s The Romanoffs, an anthology series co-written and directed by Matthew Weiner, is ambitious but disappointingly inconsistent.

It’s hard to believe that Weiner and company couldn’t have hit the same thematic beats and delivered tighter, more engaging drama in the run time of a standard episode of television, but there’s a sense that someone involved here considered length a sign of value. ... In the first two, Melab is particularly subtle and excellent as she steals the superior first film and Bishé reminded me how phenomenal she was on “Halt and Catch Fire” in the second one.

Matthew Weiner's grand return to television for the first time since his Emmy award-winning Mad Men went off the air in 2015 is unfortunately nowhere near the caliber of that period drama.

As great as these actors are, they can’t always save what are often thinly drawn characters, especially given their easily telegraphed motivations and schemes. Those waiting for twists won’t find them, which would be fine if that character drama landed.

It's a prime example of "prestige TV" run amok: all glitz, A-list stars and exotic filming locations with nothing substantive underneath. Hacky, navel-gazing and self-aggrandizing.

The writer (or co-writer) and director of every episode relies too heavily on the general mystery surrounding the family to drive interest, and his running times are unforgivably self-indulgent. While the production team has done fine work, from the elegant costuming to lush real-world locations, these episodes don’t deserve their length, especially with Weiner’s uninspired framings and tepid pacing.