The Romanoffs tries and fails in creating Prestige TV in the form of self-contained movie-length episodes

Slate

Matthew Weiner's eight-episode Amazon anthology series, like its characters, "continuously puts its worst, least interesting foot forward, aristocratically expecting you’ll stick around to see the next step," says Willa Paskin. She adds: "It has become a cliché for the makers of TV shows to tout them as movies, as in: 'It’s really like a movie, stretched out over eight episodes.' The run time of each episode of The Romanoffs, all of which Weiner directed and wrote or co-wrote, suggests an ambitious corollary: 'It’s really like eight movies.' ... But despite running the length of a movie, The Romanoffs unfolds at the unhurried pace of a prestige TV drama, and this makes for an unhappy combination. A TV show is a long-term relationship: Plot holes, underdeveloped characters, fuzzy motivations are also potential rabbit holes, places for the story to go. But in a self-contained, 90-minute burst, in a story that you know is supposed to end relatively soon, this pacing is a kind of provocation: How long until you pull out your second screen?"

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• The Romanoffs is proof that creativity without limits can be dangerous, even for someone as gifted as Matthew Weiner
• The Romanoffs episodes play together like a nice long weekend at an independent film festival in the mountains somewhere
• It's like a Black Mirror of relationships, privilege and ruling classes in decline
• The Romanoffs is a series with an uneasy relationship to plot in a format that thrives on it -- it favors character, but hasn’t the time to delve into it
• Matthew Weiner is trying too hard to escape Mad Men's shadow
• The show is probably the biggest blank check in TV history -- all of Amazon's money is up on screen
• The Romanoffs is very close to being something extraordinary, but Weiner indulges too much
• When the story lets the series down, the impeccable production value lifts it back up
• It's the ultimate vanity project: The Romanoffs somehow moves both too quickly and too slowly
• The Romanoffs satirizes the desperation of white privilege in decline
• Corey Stoll's wife is actually married to one of the Romanovs
• Matthew Weiner: The Romanoffs is a "wildest-dreams scenario"