The Romanoffs Review: The Violet Hour & The Royal We (Season 1 Episodes 1 & 2)
On The RomanoffsSeason 1 Episodes 1 & 2 The Violet Hour & The Royal We — Amazon’s eagerly awaited new show — characters flounce around and ponder their existences as supposed kin of Russian royal blood. They’re loosely tied together by the supposed familial blood of descendants from a Russian royal family, the Romanovs.
Dreamt up by Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner, it’s not difficult to have high hopes for such a show. Creating an anthology series is an ambitious venture, especially placing characters in the same world — Black Mirror doesn’t have as much of an issue with that because each world can be carefully crafted to each episode.
Thus, the episodes themselves almost act as standalone episodes and even small movies, considering their length. However, like Black Mirror, the episodes themselves don’t have to rigorously connect in any way, at least at this point.
The Romanoffs now notoriously has an extraordinarily high budget, mostly offered to the most prestigious of shows with high potential and market value. However, it’s disappointingly messy and again falls headlong into the traps of prestige TV — morose eccentricity just for the sake of morose eccentricity and a big budget for the sake of grandeur in place of narrative and character.
The Romanoffs may be extraordinarily pretty and visually magnificent — but it’s also extraordinarily white and boring. If you take away the money and the glamour, you don’t get much beyond a few somewhat pitiful white characters looking for a sense of purpose in being white.
Yes, it’s ethnicity (Russian!) over race, but it’s not really tied to a sense of pride in culture. Instead, it’s tied to a desperate attempt to glean worth from a past that’s steeped in sociopolitically complex history — and it’s not particularly pretty.
The show seems like it’s trying to subvert privilege, but instead, it just feeds into it more. I don’t watch TV to see a bunch of rich white folks ponder their existences as descendants of an over-glamorized, over-romanticized royal family with drama, tragedy, and terrible things associated with its name.
No amount of storytelling will ever overcome this unless there is an end goal to the series and narrative — which it seems like it doesn’t, considering the anthological nature of the show.
And unless there’s a reckoning in the future of the characters, we’re just watching over-indulgent characters buy into a romanticized past for their blood lineage and ancestry, not to mention racism for the sake of the show trying to prove its authenticity. In a sense, that’s literally encouraging indulgence in privilege (and even more dangerously so, white privilege).
I’m hoping that the future episodes might present a little more varied of a perspective, but given the basis of the show, I’m unfortunately not particularly hopeful — but I’m open to hearing other takes!
What did you think of these episodes of The Romanoffs? Share your thoughts in the comments below!
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The Romanoffs airs Fridays on Amazon Video.
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Olivia Popp
Olivia Popp is a freelance writer, artist, and entertainment fanatic who started living and breathing television ever since her parents told her in elementary school that it would rot her brain. Now, she's a film student and TV apologist with a penchant for providing forceful and unsolicited series recommendations to anyone within earshot. Ask her about science fiction, comedy, nature photography, filmmaking, tasty cheese, or even more television.