The Romanoffs Review: Panorama (Season 1 Episode 6)
The Romanoffs Season 1 Episode 6, “Panorama,” is the second attempt at exploring a more free-flowing narrative, yet it again descends into a somber, uninteresting, and barely pieced together mess of an episode.
The Romanoff/Romanov umbrella connection is starting to get more and more tenuous as the series goes on.
On this episode, it’s barely tossed in as an aside, and the attempt to connect it to the overall narrative at hand (the son’s sickness being translated along the Romanoff line) feels like a throwaway fact.
Put simply, “Panorama” is pretty much a white male hegemonic fantasy in disguise–a sulky younger man of color lusting after an older white woman with a charming young son with a blood disorder.
Seriously, the first thing we see Abel doing is looking at women on Tinder as he soliloquizes in pseudo-poetic voiceovers. It’s like something out of a terrible romance B-movie.
The broken narrative feels like a faux-contemplative 90-minute wet dream designed to make men nod slowly in their seats and argue with people on the Internet who don’t see television as a “true artistic medium.”
Even though Abel plays the “nice guy” and (thankfully!) doesn’t force or try to “convince” Victoria into doing something she doesn’t want to (wow, is it sad that this is the standard for male characters now?), he’s left brooding and walking into a real-life version of the mythicized, romanticized Diego Rivera mural he dramatically presented to her in the middle of the episode.
Like The Romanoffs Season 1 Episode 5, “Bright and High Circle,” this episode is littered with an obnoxious, confusing sound motif: a police siren (the helicopter sound being the noise from the previous episode). Again, for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out what it was getting at–is the episode trying to warn us about Abel? About Victoria? About Abel falling into some sort of trap?
All in all, the episode may be pretty, but it’s vain. That doesn’t make for good television, nor will it ever. There’s nothing in this episode that justifies the usage (or misusage) of the Rivera mural, nor does it explain so many elements about why we should care about Abel at all, really.
I was honestly hoping that The Romanoffs was going to go in a different, more engaging, more insightful direction this episode. As much as I hate saying it, it was still more entertaining to watch self-indulgent white people who think they’re Romanoffs wreck their lives than it was to watch Abel try to woo Victoria.
We don’t even get that much of Abel being a reporter, albeit a questionable one–his quest to uncover the details of the sketchy clinic is unsuccessful, his boss hates him, and he seemingly doesn’t really like himself, either. He even has a tense relationship with the woman he was with before who helped him get the blood samples, and yet he doesn’t seem to care, either.
Also, what’s with the weird aspect ratio? Did a TV show just purposefully change the aspect ratio to like 2.35 just to look more cinematic? Was that the only thing that they thought of to complement the disappointingly miserable love story?
Well, here’s to a more tolerable next episode.
What did you think of this episode 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.