At the beginning of 2018 the insiders and the most attentive and pretentious fans would have unanimously agreed that The Romanoffs would be the most awaited series of the year, the one with more reasons to become a masterpiece, the one with more arrows to their bow to become a cult.
A few weeks after airing unfortunately we have to turn the predictions upside down and say that The Romanoffs is the most disappointing series of the year, not the worst but certainly the one that has disappointed the most.
The direction and screenplay of the 8 episodes was one of those names that give the shivers to all serial aficionados: Matthew Wiener. A man who, from the scriptwriters of an unforgettable series like the Sopranos, had managed to unhook himself, set up on his own and give birth to that timeless masterpiece that was Mad Men, a series that, like Breaking Bad, shattered the serial landscape of the 2000s.
The project was then produced by Amazon, now a certainty when it comes to seriality. The series would have been anthological, allowing a change of cast that included such high-sounding names as Aaron Eckart, Christina Hendricks, Corey Stoll just to name a few.
An ambitious project but one that had such a solid foundation that it could be declared a success even before the airing.
It was not, unfortunately.
To be honest, there were a few small indications that something might have gone wrong. During production, in fact, there had been several stops due to the involvement (never confirmed) of Matthew Wiener in the Weinstein scandal. A few too many insinuations from former collaborators were about to compromise the project. In the end it was decided to continue but inevitably something broke, or at least cooled down.
The 8-episode series aimed to tell 8 stories about 8 heirs of the Romanoff dynasty who had reigned thriving in their mother Russia in the last century. Today's stories of people who descended from a great empire but who today found themselves to be ordinary people, forgotten and clinging to the glitter of their family jewels.
From the very first episode it was clear that something had not worked properly. Very long episodes of 90 minutes, trivial stories framed in a regal background, difficulty to see a thin red thread joining everything made it difficult to enjoy this product. There was no leap, no vision, as if everything had been staged too hastily and too artificially.
For the tenor of the names involved and for the ambition put in place the project was therefore very very disappointing.
Don't be fooled though, the series isn't bad at all and on the contrary, it allows itself to be watched offering a lot of food for thought and great acting and directing rehearsals.
The central theme of all the stories seemed to be the loss of identity, a theme very dear to Wiener who in practice had founded the success of Mad Men's Don Draper on this very aspect.
Every protagonist, in fact, seemed to be lost in a society that no longer recognized in descendants of such a glorious family that power, that charm they believed they had. A lonely, bitter old woman among family heirlooms, a dissatisfied husband looking for himself in a marriage that was too fake and compromised. A starlet who thought she was a star and finds herself a pawn. A feminist director too obsessed with her ancestors to jeopardize her art and her career. A series of characters in search of an author who in their micro-world can not accept the loss of their beauty, their charm, their mystery. A dynasty that continues but that has long since died, exterminated by time itself more than by the Russian revolution that swept them away.
There are beautiful things to see, to tell, interesting dialogues but everything is lost in the background of a series that wanted to be shining and finds itself to be ordinary.
Just like the lives of its protagonists.
