My 20 Favorite Television Shows of 2018

I was a bad little boy in 2018.  For the past few years I've used the intro of this list to chronicle my efforts to decrease the amount of TV shows I watch every year, my small but futile way to protest the content wave of Peak TV.  (Truthfully, it's just an effort to clear out space to watch more movies and older TV shows, so I'm no hero.)  And I had been making good progress, progressing from around 130 shows per year when I started doing these lists to last year's 100.  Watching less than 100 shows seems pretty simple, right?

Well...about that.

I watched a total of 103 shows in 2018.  But hear me out!  I really do think I did a better job of managing my TV intake, getting much better at not continuing with shows that I don't like, and even cutting out long-running shows that I still somewhat like but have gotten a little bored with (sorry, Bob's Burgers).  Even my torturous efforts to watch every network pilot are far behind me.  All of this has led to more time for older shows and movies.  After all, I watched more new films than ever this year and I devoted half of this year to watching all 156 episodes of The Twilight Zone.  Still, it's just that the amount of new scripted content keeps growing like a tumor, so even though I most likely watched a lower percentage of shows in existence out there this year, the actual number still ended up being higher.

So while I'm here and still watching too much TV, I might as well sort out the best of the best and give you my favorites from the year.  Really, I do this all for you guys, not to fuel my own sick addiction.  No, not at all.

The rules: Shows are considered for this list based on the episodes they aired in 2018.  This is a pretty plain and simple rule for cable dramas, where full seasons usually air within a single calendar year.  However, it gets slightly messy when considering network shows, which usually air the first half of their season in the fall and the second half starting January of the next year.  So something like, say, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend would be judged based on the second half of its third season (which aired at the beginning of the year) and the first half of its fourth and final season (which started in the fall of this year).  As for what constitutes a TV show, anything that airs on, you know, a TV station counts.  But shows that air exclusively on streaming services like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon count too.  Movies that exclusively appear on those services like say, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, do not count.  I give it a few years before all of these definitions become completely meaningless though.  No TV, no movies, just #Content.

My 20 Favorite Films of 2018

This year, I saw a total of 104 new releases, compared to the usual 65 or so.  Part of that is because of a concerted effort to commit myself more to film, but it's also because of the increased democratization of the medium.  As much as critics and purists like to complain about Netflix invading the release market and ruining the cinema experience, they've made movies that often would have otherwise been relegated to the festival-to-limited-coastal-screening pipeline instantly accessible to everyone around the world.  Not to mention the types of films that are mostly seen only by critics seem to have gotten online releases much sooner lately, which allows for regular folks like myself to do more end of the year catch-ups.

For those reasons, I have less complaining to dish out about not seeing important films in time than I usually do in these intros.  I've seen a majority of the major films that are in contention for everybody's Best Ofs, aside from If Beale Street Could Talk and a few others.  So let's take a look at my favorites from 2018's crop of films.

The rules: As long as a film got an official release in 2018, it was eligible for placement on this list.  This is an important thing to remember, since some of the films that appear in my top 20 premiered at film festivals in 2017, but didn't get released in theaters until this year.  And in the case where a film got no theatrical release, then a VOD debut in 2018 will make it eligible.

My 20 Favorite Albums of 2018

How do you sum up 2018 when it comes to music?  You can't, so I'll give a list of just a few of the phases of music discourse from this year: Kanye West produced five albums in five weeks, Drake and Pusha T had a beef in which a secret child was revealed, Beyonce and Jay-Z released a surprise album that everyone forgot about three days later, Eminem had a psychotic break in a Youtube video, Travis Scott rapped "She thought it was the ocean, it's just a pool," critics tried to convince us that The 1975 are good.

So yeah...it was a wild year.  Let's just get to the list.

The rules: Everything is the same as usual.  The window of eligibility for this list is anything released between January 1, 2018 and now.  This list can include albums, mixtapes, EPs, and anything in between.  I'm praying that nothing substantial comes out in the twilight hours of the year.  You never know with surprise releases these days...

50 Songs I Liked in 2018

On December 29th, I'll be starting off my end of the year lists with my 20 favorite albums of 2018.  But there's so much great music out there that my album post will only cover a very tiny portion of the stuff that's worth listening to.  So this list is an additional rundown, one that highlights songs from albums that won't be appearing on the top 20 list in a few days.  I made a minor change this year and am now allowing songs from my five honorable mention albums to appear on this list as well.  So if you see something on here from an album you love, who knows, maybe that album is ranked somewhere between 21 and 25 for me!  Even this doesn't fully cover the quality that the year had to offer, but it's a good representation of what I generally liked this year.

The Romanoffs - "The One That Holds Everything" review

For the past seven episodes, The Romanoffs has mostly been a concept-first show.  That's not to say it didn't have interesting characters, but it always felt like they were secondary to the circumstances they were put in for the sake of the story.  What we learned about them were mostly reflections of the plot and theme of a given episode.  In the finale, the show offers up its first true character study.

"The One That Holds Everything" starts on a train station in France, as we get a quick little nod to the premiere episode with Greg (Aaron Eckhart) and Sophie (Louise Bourgoin) from "The Violet Hour" passing through the frame for a few seconds.  But the person of focus in this outing is Jack (JJ Feild), who was the writer of the Romanov miniseries from "The House of Special Purpose."  When he boards the train, he finds that a woman is sitting in his seat by the window.  The woman (Adele Anderson), who introduces herself as Candace, gets to chatting with Jack about the Romanovs, claiming she once knew someone who was a descendant.  Clearly, Jack has little interest in conversation, and would just like to get back to reading his book, but Candace's insistence eventually gets the better of him, particularly when she teases that the story of her Romanov friend involves murder.

The episode cuts into the middle of Candace's story, as we see a man named Simon (Hugh Skinner) visiting his dying father.  Evidently, their relationship has been strained for a while, as they don't exactly exchange friendly words, and he has even less friendly words for the woman taking care of his father.  The difficulty of those interactions prove to be too much for Simon, who decides to take a handful of pills and try to drink himself to death, though he fails and ends up in the hospital.  While telling his story to a support group, we flash back further in time to provide some more context about his life. After his mother died and his father married another woman, he traveled to Hong Kong to become a bond trader, where he fell in love with his male best friend.  But when his friend/lover announces he's getting married to a woman, Simon gets upset and tries to out him to the new fiance.

This episode functions like a Russian matryoshka doll, nesting flashback within flashback as it travels further into the past.  It moves just as we do when speculating about how a person came to be the way they are now, tracing back into their lineage to find clues that may make sense of things. That's what Simon's friend attempts in an effort to explain away his actions, jumping back to Simon's troubled upbringing.

Simon is a Romanov descendant through his mother, who we see has earrings that have been passed down through many generations of the family.  One night, he discovers his father is having an affair with his nanny Ondine (Hera Hilmar) when he spots the two of them canoodling outside of his bedroom window as his father is about to take her home.  A fire breaks out in the middle of a later night when Simon's father is away, killing Simon's mother and almost killing him in the process as well.  While the police and fire department gather outside, Simon sees Ondine among the bystanders and begins to suspect she was responsible for the fire.  Shortly after, Ondine moves in and assumes the role of Simon's mother figure, ultimately getting him sent away to boarding school.

In this chain of flashbacks, Simon's story is painted like some sort of dark fairy tale.  Throughout the series, the score has been quite restrained and unobtrusive, but it's very prevalent here, with the sweeping strings rising in grandiose fashion.  And the direction is different too, featuring brighter colors that pop out out of the otherwise muted filters to give it a vivid storybook aesthetic.  The grimness of Simon's plight is almost Dickensian in its tragedy.  There's even an evil stepmother, in case the tone this story is aiming for wasn't clear enough.

And of course, it's not a true fairy tale without a few twists of fate.  Many years later, after the death of his father, Simon (who has begun transitioning and now presents as a woman) visits Ondine to try to get his mother's Romanov family earrings back from her.  Despite pretending to understand Simon's transition, Ondine throws some cruel barbs at her when she refuses to let her have the earrings, saying that since Simon isn't a "real woman," then the earrings deserve to stay with her.  Eventually, Ondine's son shows up and we realize that it's Jack, the man who is being regaled with this whole tale, and that the woman telling him this story on the train is who he knew to be Simon.  That's when the true punchline arrives: Candace has poisoned Jack's drink as an act of familial revenge on Ondine.

It's an odd, over-the-top twist on its face, but it's in keeping with that dark, fantastical tone the episode is going for.  The reveal would be right at home near the end of an Edgar Allan Poe short story.  It also clarifies the theme that the episode and the show as a whole has been building towards.  Amazon's short description of "The One That Holds Everything" is: "In a story that circles the globe, a man tries to escape his family curse."  Candace comes from a family that was virtually wiped out in a fusillade of bullets.  And more immediately, she lived through the hardship of her mother dying, being terrorized by her stepmother, and getting sent off to boarding school.  In a way, this is her breaking that Romanov family curse, getting cosmic vengeance for all the wrongdoing that has been brought upon her head.  By obtaining this symbol of family and femininity, she gets to finally crystallize the identity she's been craving her whole life even if she didn't know it, both as a woman and someone who belongs to something greater than herself.  The series closes just as the opening credits do, with a Romanov living on, casually slipping away into the crowd.

So that's the end of The Romanoffs.  Was it a success?  Most people would have you believe that it wasn't, but I loved the show from start to finish (with the exception of "Panorama").  This series was an example of what happens when one of our greatest living television writers gets a blank check to do whatever he wants.  That resulted in some bloated storytelling and truly wild flights of ego, but it also gave us a bounty of rich writing and a show that existed in a space that no other series come close to living in.  What a joy it was to parse this series from week to week -- it's right up there with Twin Peaks: The Return as one of the great viewing experiences of this decade.  In an age where weekly watching is dying rapidly, that's something to cherish.

On a pure premise level, the show was united by the fact that each episode centered on someone who believed themselves to be a descendant of the Romanov family.  But what really holds the show together are the ideas that it plays with.  Almost every episode wrestles with notions of identity, truth, and impropriety, delivering variations on the theme of how to live and treat others.  It's like an A.I. consumed all of the discourse that society has been engaging in over the last year and spit out eight scripts, trying to make sense of these moral quandaries in the form of stories about people behaving badly.  And therein lies the fascinating tension of The Romanoffs: it's captivating on its own, but more so coming from a creator who is a Man Who Has Behaved Badly.  Perhaps we should let the text be text, but it's hard to do that when so much of that text feels like a creator's direct reckoning with himself and the world around him.  I get the sense that this is a turnoff to some people, but to me it made the show all the more hypnotizing.  Even in its failures, there was so much to unpack.

Here was a show that tapped into the dark hearts of its characters and let them engage in their worst impulses.  In that sense, it exists on the same continuum as Mad Men, Matt Weiner's previous work.  When taken together with that show, the affairs and betrayals and transgressions of The Romanoffs aren't the product of shared lineage between these specific people.  Weiner argues that it's just a common trait among humans no matter what the time period, geographic location, or family background.  So maybe The Romanoffs should be viewed not as a standalone miniseries but as a descendant of the great Mad Men -- more difficult and fussy, but you can still see the resemblance all the same.

Bonus Points

-"The One That Holds Everything" was written by Donald Joh and Matthew Weiner, and it was directed by Matthew Weiner.  I assumed Weiner would choose for the finale to have symmetry with the first episode and be solely written by him, but I was wrong.  He sure did direct the hell out of this episode though.  His use of color felt like one of the Jennifer Getzinger directed episodes of Mad Men.

-I never got to really dig into this in detail in any of my reviews, but I saw this show as Weiner's attempt to do actual literary short stories in the vein of an Alice Munro or J.D. Salinger.  Technically, other anthology shows like The Twilight Zone and Black Mirror are short stories as well, but those still have a televisual flair to their storytelling.  These Romanoffs episodes felt like they were often direct translations from a collection of short stories, which led to many of the issues people found with the show.  However, I often loved the unique vibe of them.

-Shout out to that excellent choice of "West End Girls" by Pet Shop Boys to close the episode.

-Here's how I'd rank the episodes: 1. "End of the Line" 2. "The Royal We" 3. "Expectation" 4. "Bright and High Circle" 5. "The Violet Hour" 6. "The One That Holds Everything" 7. "House of Special Purpose" 8. "Panorama."  I'd classify the top three as excellent, the next three as very good (or in the case of "Bright and High Circle," delightfully insane), the next one as pretty good, and the last one as fine.  A pretty high batting average for an anthology show if you ask me!

-I'm guessing this is the last Romanoffs review I'll ever write since this show most likely won't get another season, but this was so fun!  A part of me is relieved it's over because writing these reviews took alot out of me, but I think they also helped me enjoy the show more.  I hope its reputation slowly improves because I do believe it's doing alot of interesting things, but if not, then these reviews will always be here as a time capsule of me being the one crazy person who loved that show made by an egotistical sexual harasser.

The Romanoffs - "End of the Line" review

The Romanoffs has been quite the diasporic series so far.  Episode settings have ranged from Mexico to Paris to New York and have featured people from all walks of life, a deliberate choice to show just how much the myth and lineage of the Romanov family has spread across the world.  But it also is meant to examine how tenuous that connection is, because there's not much real proof that these people are really Romanovs and even if they are, it's been so long since the family existed as the world at large knew them.  None of the people featured so far have been Russian or have even been to Russia.  Well "End of the Line" marks a first in one of those categories, as we finally take a trip to the Motherland.

Most of the previous installments have received complaints about their expository dialogue, but this is an episode that keeps its cards close to its chest for a very long time.  It opens on Anka (Kathryn Hahn) and Joe (Jay R. Ferguson), an American couple on a flight to Russia.  It's not clear exactly what their purpose is for travelling here, but there's a mixture of excitement and nervousness as they're being processed through customs.  You get a sense of the culture clash that exists, as Anka reminds Joe not to smile when they're getting their passports checked.  Once they're finished, they meet Elena (Annet Mehendru), a chipper Russian woman who serves as their guide.  Lots of strange exchanges occur, from money to children's clothes, and they ask Elena about someone named "Oksana."  It's a terse set of scenes, which only adds to the tense and alienating feeling of the cagey introduction.

Eventually, we're able to parse out enough information to figure out that Anka and Paul are in Russia to bring back a child they're planning to adopt.  Anka is a descendant of the Romanov family, and she tells Elena that she wants to adopt a Russian child as an effort to stay in touch with her heritage.  Though it's not explicitly stated, she sees having a Russian baby as an indirect way of keeping the Romanov line going, a concern that also was the focus of "The Violet Hour."  After a few more exchanges of papers and gifts, they finally meet Oksana at the orphanage.  However, their excitement is tempered with a few strains of concern, as they notice a weird rash on the baby and that she isn't very responsive when they spend some alone time with her.  That feeling of unease continues when they meet some of the other kids at the orphanage, and one of the little girls uses a foreign word regarding the baby that gets her scolded by a nurse.

Back at the hotel while trying to research the nature of Oksana's rash, Anka runs into an American woman (Clea Duvall) she saw earlier who is also there to adopt a child.  She invites Anka and Joe to accompany her and her mother to the flea market, and the nature of the episode begins to curdle a little more on the ride there.  There's a tinge of xenophobia to the conversation in the car when discussing the treatment of children in Russia, as if by adopting these babies, these women are saving them from a country of barbarians.  The following scene leads to the ultimate turning point of the episode, as Anka learns the word she heard in the orphanage earlier means "drinker."  This sets her off into a spiral, completely extrapolating that the baby is suffering from some sort of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome because of this.

The episode uses this moment as a fascinating catalyst, where the uncovering of information about the baby also reveals Anka and Joe's true characters to each other.  They get into an intense fight after Anka insists that she doesn't want the baby now that she knows it will have problems and Joe is appalled by this fact.  Their argument gets at the heart of one of the central issues that The Romanoffs has been circling around this whole time: the nature of charity and how much of our good-heartedness is genuine versus how much is vanity.  Anka says some pretty ugly things about the prospect of having a child that might have developmental issues, views she insists Joe would have too if he wasn't so concerned with proving to others that he's a saint.

It's here where the lack of history and context with these characters bolsters the episode.  At this point we've only spent about 50 minutes with Anka and Joe, and we haven't been given much information about them beyond their present goal, so when they have their fight, it's hard to know how much truth there is to the accusations they lay at each other's feet.  Is Joe really genuine in his desire to do the right thing?  Is Anka simply reacting to the deception that she's just been through and doesn't fully believe all the things she's saying?  From what we're given, Anka certainly doesn't come off looking good, but it's also a bold choice to have a character -- especially a woman -- voice concerns that alot of people would wrestle with if they were placed in the same position.

When the time comes to finally take Oksana home, Anka can't quell her doubts and tells Elena and the director of the orphanage that she doesn't want the baby, accusing them of lying and foul play.  This outrages the director, who leaves the room with Elena to further discuss the matter.  Anka begins to panic that something bad is going to happen to them as a consequence of refusing to take the baby, a feeling brought on by her seeing chairs similar to the ones in the opening credits where the Romanov family was assassinated, coupled with her general anxiety about being in this nation she views with skepticism.  But when Elena and the director come back, they have a new, healthy baby for Anka and Joe take home.  Once it's made official in court (after an impassioned final statement from Joe), they're free to go back to America as the perfect nuclear family they pictured themselves becoming on the plane ride there.  In the final shot, the camera lingers on Joe's face with a conflicted twinge.

Joe is the moral center on which the episode pivots.  He's the one who makes the appeal to humanity when Anka is going on about not wanting to raise a baby like Oksana, and he seems to mean it when it comes to wanting to accept what life has presented them.  Yet for all of his grandstanding, when given the choice between a healthy baby and a non-healthy one, he happily chooses the healthy one.  That realization, that loss of moral footing, that's what haunts him in those final moments.  "End of the Line" feels like the perfect kind of penultimate episode.  Even though this show isn't beholden to the traditional structure of a serialized season, this installment does heigthen the dramatic stakes more than any of its predecessors.  And just as last week's "Panorama" was an inversion of many of the ideas expressed in previous episodes of the season, this week is an amalgamation of the show's biggest themes, one more meditation on goodwill, parentage, and the true selves we hide under the mask of adherence to societal expectations before the finale.

Bonus Points
-This episode was written by Andre and Maria Jacquemetton, and directed by Matthew Weiner.  The Jacquemettons have been Weiner lieutenants since season one of Mad Men, the George Pelecanos to his David Simon.  It's an episode that still feels of a piece with the rest of the series, while having its own coarse flair.

-When the cast for this show was first announced, the person I flipped out about the most aside from Kerry Bishe was Kathryn Hahn.  For a long time she was one of the world's most underrated actors, relegated to bit parts where she stole the show.  But lately she's been getting more leading roles and it's been a real joy to see.  She's the rare kind of actor who excels equally at comedy and drama, both of which she displays here.  I love the moment after she reminds Paul not to smile in customs, only to give a reflexive little smile and then shake her head and catch herself.  Not to mention the hilarious moment in the orphanage when she says "He keeps things running smoothly!" a little too loudly.  Her likability as an actress is part of the reason why the episode can push Anka to such harsh territory.

-Connection to previous episodes: Anka's "cousin whose son suffers from hemophilia" is mentioned, revealing that she's directly related to Victoria from "Panorama."

-Is there any significance to this episode being set in 2008?  Maybe people who know global history better than I do can help me out here.  The only thing I thought of was it being the year Obama was first elected, giving rise to America's current wave of wokeness.

-The concept of sainthood and martyrdom recurs frequently in this episode.  Elena even mentioned that the Romanovs were saints in Russia, serving as nurses and helping out during the first World War.

-This episode is like the opposite of last week's travelogue of Mexico.  The snowy Russian cityscape looked so bleak and imposing.

-This week's movie recommendation is Private Life, another story about a character played by Kathryn Hahn who is trying to have a baby.

The Romanoffs - "Panorama" review

We tend to not think about the order of episodes in an anthology series.  After all, the stories are not serialized, so they don't immediately present themselves as existing in a continuum.  But despite the narratives being self-contained in The Romanoffs, it's clear that these episodes are meant to be in conversation with one another in some way, and "Panorama" was the first one that really made me think about how its placement adds to that conversation.  It functions as if it might be the cornerstone of this whole enterprise, gaining more impact because of the specific stories that came before it.

The main character this week is Abel Erikson (Juan Pablo Castaneda), a journalist in Mexico trying to write an expose on a doctor who may be duping patients out of their money with an experimental stem cell treatment.  In order to do so, he lies about having leukemia to get an appointment and closer access to the doctor, but his cover is quickly blown.  Outside, he meets Victoria (Radha Mitchell), a mother whose son Nick (Paul Luke Bonenfant) is seeing the same doctor to treat his debilitating case of hemophilia.  After helping them communicate with their driver, Abel offers to give them a tour of the historical sites of Mexico, and from there he begins to build a relationship with Nick and especially Victoria.  Though he tells his boss (Griffin Dunne) that he only wants to write a piece around them, it's obvious that he's taking special interest in them because of his attraction to Victoria.

At its base level, the story of "Panorama" isn't particularly compelling.  It starts off on the wrong foot with the voiceover narration from Abel, which features some severely purpose prose.  The issues don't stop there -- Abel himself isn't all that engaging of a character, and his budding relationship with Victoria is pretty stock romance stuff.  The weakness of the story could be alleviated if the performances were anything special, but they're mostly pretty stilted, especially Bonenfant as Victoria's ill son.  It's hard to even get a read on Abel as a character because Castaneda doesn't imbue him with much personality.  And this is also the first time I've had any issues with the expository dialogue that people have been complaining out in previous weeks, because it's awfully glaring and unnatural here.

But this is an ideas episode more than a story episode, so the narrative itself takes a backseat to what it's actually trying to say.  And there are indeed a few interesting themes that "Panorama" tosses around.  So many of the previous stories in The Romanoffs have centered on what many would describe as "first world problems."  They're about how, when you're afforded the privilege that these Romanov descendants and the people in their social strata have, you're given the luxury of worrying about things like inheriting expensive apartments, whether cheating on your wife will heal the boredom of your life, and neighborhood gossip about your kid's piano teacher.  When you're shielded from having to reckon with things that are actually necessary for survival, trivial things become life or death.  In the form Victoria and Nick's story, this episode offers a contrast to that.  As the doctor mentions to Abel early on, "God does not discriminate between the rich and the poor when it comes to disease."

One of the first places Abel takes Victoria and Nick is the National Palace, which features Diego Rivera's mural The History of Mexico.  After the Mexican Revolution ended in the 1920s, the government commissioned Rivera and other artists to paint scenes depicting Mexican history.  Rivera, famously a Communist radical, took on this project and used the mural to celebrate the victory of the government and its overthrowing of the previous regime.  The History of Mexico mural imagines history as something that is non-linear, something that exists all once, the past lingering in the present and hanging around to inform the future.  That's one of the central ideas that The Romanoffs wrestles with as a series.  And it's something the forms the foundation of an episode like "Panorama" too, even though it takes a while to become clear.  Late in the episode, Victoria reveals to Abel that she is descendant of the Romanov family and that she's responsible for her son's hemophilia, as the disease runs throughout their line.  "You'd think that royal blood dilutes over time, but the poison survives," she laments.

It's fitting that the Romanov reveal doesn't come until an hour into the episode, because it isn't about them just as much as it is.  The previous five episodes have focused on these people who have connections to this royal family from generations ago, but "Panorama" makes an effort to show how small their impact is in the wider scope of global history.  As we see in Rivera's mural and all throughout the episode, there's an entire fabric of culture and history that exists completely outside of those concerns of the rich.  The story of Mexico is one of real struggle, of real adversity.  It's the exact kind of revolution that the Romanov family were on the opposite end of.

These are intriguing questions to ponder, but does it make for a good episode?  Not necessarily.  "Panorama" is the first offering I'd qualify as a bit of a dud.  It's not a complete failure, because it's nice to get something a little more cerebral, but it would've been even nicer to have a more engaging story happening on the surface.  Still, if this ends up being the only miss, that would be a pretty good track record for the series.


Bonus Points
-"Panorama" was co-written by Matthew Weiner and Dan LaFranc, and was directed by Matthew Weiner.

-This episode contains the least amount of star power out of all the installments so far.  The biggest name here is Griffin Dunne, who's relegated to a bit part as Abel's boss.  David Sutcliffe, whom you may remember as Rory's dad in Gilmore Girls, also appears in a couple of scenes as Victoria's ex-husband.

-The doctor about whom Abel is writing the investigative piece is named Siquieros, which is the same name as one of the other artists commissioned by the Mexican government to create artwork about the history of the country.

-Say what you will about the episode, but it certainly makes the most out of its location.  The shots of all the Mexican locales are gorgeous.

-The street performer song at the end of the episode was written and performed by Regina Spektor.  Remember her?

The Romanoffs - "Bright and High Circle" review

Because of the greater ease of access we have when it comes to everything that goes into the making of television shows, there has been a "Cult of the Showrunner" that has developed over the years.  Where before shows might have been viewed purely on what was in the text of the work, they're now filtered through the lens of auteur theory.  Based on tweets and interviews and previous works, we form an entire worldview around a creator, and anything new they make is an expansion or refutation of that worldview.  There have been times in even my reviews where I've wondered whether I'm doing too much extra-textual reading when I'm analyzing episodes of The Romanoffs.  But then there are episodes like "Bright and High Circle."

It's tough to watch and review this episode without thinking about how it relates to Matthew Weiner's personal and professional life.  So I'll give a rundown for those who would otherwise be lost: Weiner had a writing assistant named Kater Gordon who started on working on Mad Men in season two and eventually became a full staff writer in season three, even winning an Emmy for an episode the two of them co-wrote together.  But Gordon left the show shortly after that, and she's never worked in the television industry since then.  (Some feel like the dynamic between Don and Peggy in the famous Mad Men episode "The Suitcase" -- particularly their argument about awards -- was Weiner making an indirect commentary on Gordon.)  We finally learned the reason for Gordon's mysterious exit from the business last November, when she revealed that she was subject to sexual harassment under Weiner's employ.  She says that during a night working alone together, he once told her that she "owed it to him to let him see her naked" as reward for all that he had done for her.  Weiner has repeatedly denied the allegations (albeit in pretty cagey language), but it's a situation that has hung over The Romanoffs release cycle.

So one would think that everyone involved with the show would want to stay away from anything involving sexual misconduct.  In all of its prior four episodes, The Romanoffs has dealt with matters of sexual impropriety, but it seemed like that's as close to reflecting upon the allegations surrounding Weiner that it would get.  Well no, it turns out.   "Bright and High Circle" chooses to tackle the matter of sexual misconduct allegations by centering an entire episode on it.  The Romanov of the week is Katherine Ford (Diane Lane), who's introduced attending a community piano recital that her sons are performing at.  It appears that piano teacher David (Andrew Rannells) is beloved by the parents and children alike, which makes it all the more surprising when a police detective visits Katherine at her office a few scenes later to question her in relation to an accusation made about David having an inappropriate relationship with a minor.  Though Katherine isn't given much information, like who even made this accusation, it's enough to throw her entire perspective out of whack.  And despite being told by the detective not to share this information with anyone else, she can't help herself, and sets off a whisper network among the community by telling one of the other moms (Nicole Ari Parker) whose kid is being taught by David.

The episode makes an interesting choice of having David not really appear in the present after the initial scene at the recital.  Instead, he is only shown in flashbacks -- a new Romanoffs staple -- as the episode flips to prior moments that everyone is relitigating in their minds now that they're equipped with the knowledge of the allegations against him.  Things that previously seemed harmless now take on a suspicious atmosphere.  And in doing so, "Bright and High Circle" implicates the audience in this fact-finding mission.  It makes us hyper-aware of the way our allegiances shift based on information that technically doesn't have anything to do with whether or not David acted inappropriately with children.  "Oh, Katherine's middle child gets angry and defensive when she asks him if David has ever made him feel uncomfortable?  He must be guilty," we think.  "Look at how passionate he is about teaching the piano!  Maybe he's not such a bad guy," that other corner of our mind rebuts.

Throughout all of this, you could probably hold on to some naive belief that this is just a thorny story that Weiner and crew were interested in telling with no agenda whatsoever.  After all, it's an engaging tale, absorbing enough to make you block all of its meta elements out of your mind.  But then it takes the time to have a scene where Katherine's husband Alex (Ron Livingston) recounts a story from his youth, where Alex had a friend with long hair whom everyone in the neighborhood accused of secretly being a girl.  One day, Alex's curiosity gets the best of him and he asks the friend if they're a girl.  When Alex later recounts this information to his parents at dinner, his dad lays into him for "believing the mob" and hurting his friend's feelings.  It's an incredibly didactic moment that feels like Matthew Weiner talking directly at the audience about jumping to conclusions.  But what truly tips it over into bonkersville is the capper to this story, which arrives near the end of the episode, when Alex reveals to Katherine that he eventually found out that his childhood friend was a girl.  In one quick strike, the episode makes what we're supposed to take away from its message incredibly muddy, as opaque as things are for the characters at the end of this story when they never truly find out what the deal is with David.

"Bright and High Circle" does an effective job of depicting what it's like to be caught in the middle of a sticky situation that has the potential to shake up a community.  It's the most traditionally watchable episode, getting lots of mileage out of the excitement involved with attempting to get to the bottom of this mystery.  In many ways, it's also the most simple episode from a storytelling standpoint, offering up a compelling conflict and really honing in on it to explore every available avenue of drama.  And as an installment of this thematically linked anthology series, it gives us another examination of people struggling with what they owe to themselves and those around them.  All around, it's a thought provoking exercise.

The problem is that this is not just a thought experiment.  It has real life implications.  By telling a story that so closely parallels his actual situation, Matthew Weiner makes it seem like he's the victim of anonymous and vague rumors run amok.  But the fact is that the accusations against him come from a real, public place and are told in vivid detail.  To stack the deck so forcefully in the other direction in a proxy version feels irresponsible.  When all is said and done, "Bright and High Circle" might be remembered as the episode that most encapsulates The Romanoffs as a whole: a strange and prickly work of hubris, but one that's absolutely fascinating nonetheless.


Bonus Points
-This should go without saying but in case it does need saying: I believe Kater Gordon.

-It can't be stressed enough how insane this episode is.  I sat through most of it with my jaw on the floor, unable to believe that Weiner and company had the nerve to do something like this.  By the time it got to the one-two punch of Alex's childhood story plus the final reveal of that story, I was cackling from how loony it all was.

-"Bright and High Circle" is co-written by Kriss Turner Towner and Matthew Weiner, and it's directed by Matthew Weiner.  It's entirely possible that this idea was Towner's or some other person in the writers room, but even if that's the case, it's nuts that Weiner would hear it and think "Yes, we should do that."

-You'll recall that around the time the long-rumored sexual misconduct accusations around Louis C.K. dropped last year, he was also slated to have a movie he wrote and directed called I Love You, Daddy be released.  It was about a teenage girl who is seduced by a much older filmmaker.  Though it wasn't directly related to the rumors about him, some critics who saw it at film festivals felt like it was a confession.  That's how this episode feels.  That's how this whole series feels!

-When the credits roll on a new episode, I always think "well how am I supposed to review that?"  So you can imagine the particular pain I felt at the end of this one.  What a minefield Mr. Weiner has stepped into and has thus made me step into.

-Connections to previous episodes this week: Katherine Ford is a relative of the husband of Amanda Peet's character from "Expectation."  Also, Katherine's son is playing the same phone game that Corey Stoll's character is playing while awaiting jury duty in "The Royal We."

-The casting of Andrew Rannells as David is such a wonderful choice.  His demeanor can be read as boyish charm or oily plasticity depending on what angle you look at it from.  I've always liked him, but this performance is particularly great.

-One argument that gets made in the episode, and one that gets thrown out alot in real life, is that accusations like these can ruin a man's life.  But keep in mind that Matthew Weiner's life is doing just fine.  He just got a truck full of money to make a series in which he complains that accusations can ruin a man's life.

-I like the symbolism of ants in this episode.  Katherine wakes up in the middle of the night to find one ant crawling on her arm, and even though there's no evidence of there being other ants, she can't stop itching hours later.  A neat little way to package the nature of the suspicions about David.

-My movie recommendation of the week is Unfaithful, the erotic thriller starring Diane Lane that was very, let's say, "formative" for me as a young boy.

The Romanoffs - "Expectation" review

People on the internet keep complaining about the length of these episodes of The Romanoffs, but not only have I found them to be quite manageable, they largely feel much shorter than a movie that's 90 minutes.  Yes, there is a wider problem with episode lengths in TV, but to equate the length of The Romanoffs to that of bloated Netflix shows is a specious argument.  First, these are self-contained stories with a discrete beginning, middle, and end whereas the latter are structureless chunks of a larger content blob.  Second, The Romanoffs makes better use of its family sized runtime.  Scenes in this show breathe and simmer, they don't just stall for time.  Nevertheless, the show gives us something a little shorter this week with the 63-minute "Expectation."

We're introduced to Julia (Amanda Peet) who's meeting her pregnant daughter Ella (Emily Rudd) for breakfast.  There's some general expositional information that the scene delivers -- Ella is due any day now, the doctors are recommending she induce birth, she is choosing not to, the rest of the family is upset about this -- but it's even more revealing of the relationship between Julia and Ella.  The conversation between them is fascinating, as Julia expresses her disappointment in Ella's "old fashioned" views on being an adult woman, since she's opted to not work and marry a rich man who will do all of the providing for her.  Ella then snaps back with some criticisms of her own for her mother, alleging that her philanthropy is only a symptom of her need to feel good about herself.  It's an interesting clash of ideals -- Ella insisting that her life's accomplishment will be that she raised great children, Julia arguing that that's not enough -- one that flips each generation's usual stance.

Afterward, Julia meets with a man named Daniel (John Slattery), who's a friend, but it's clear that there's something more going on between the two.  We learn that the two of them had an affair together years ago and that he's actually Ella's father.  In the first piece of actual bleed over between episodes, we've seen Daniel before.  He's the man who briefly appeared in "The Royal We" giving a seminar on Romanov history to the cruise attendees.  Not only that, but he wrote a book on the Romanovs that's being turned into a miniseries, the same miniseries that's being shot in "House of Special Purpose."  It's a fun bit of connectivity that serves to give the feeling that these people's stories really do exist in the same world.  But more so than that, it adds thematic resonance to Daniel's dilemma.  There's a key line later when Julia is speaking with her friend Katherine (Diane Lane) over the phone about Daniel's book, where Katherine criticizes the book because "there's nothing worse than historians guessing at people's hearts 300 years ago."  Here Daniel is, forced to guess at a royal family's history, while he's also had to so with his more immediate family, seeing his daughter's entire life from the sidelines, having to act as her creepy uncle instead.

The episode doles out the information about Ella's paternity through flashbacks from Julia's perspective.  It's presented as if she's remembering these moments, triggered by what's going on in the present day.  This big milestone has activated an onslaught of feelings about the place that she's in: about to be a grandmother, shocked by how the years have gotten away from her, troubled by the life her daughter is embarking on, and haunted by the truth her own life.  These flashbacks, then, are the puzzle pieces she's hoping she can rearrange to gain some sort clarity and ease.  The episode employs her turmoil in stylish fashion, with match cuts similar to those in "The Royal We," even nesting them within one another at one point.

There's even a fractured nature to the episode beyond those flashbacks.  The scene between Julia and Ella in the beginning of the episode jumps ahead in time from them fighting in a restaurant to reconciling as they part ways, and later, it frames a fight between Julia and Daniel at a bookstore in a silent wide shot, only to cut back to chunks of the scene later in the episode.  It's a stylistic choice that pays off in the episode's climactic scene, where Julia and her husband Peter are getting ready for a dinner with Ella's in-laws.  He mentions off-handedly that he's essentially giving handouts to Daniel, paying for Daniel and his wife to come out on a trip with them, which she accuses of being patronizing.  Peter's rebuttal is that he owes it to Daniel, as someone who's more well-off than his friend, citing the idea of noblesse oblige.  It's a notion that brings to mind some of what "The Violet Hour" was wrestling with, as much of Anushka and Greg's behavior toward Hajar in that episode had the stain of it.  The false honor in charity that these people feel is something that runs through them.

But the term noblesse oblige appears to trigger something in Julia as well, as it also calls back to the charges Ella makes against her, calling out the falseness of Julia's do-gooder attitude.  It causes her to finally come clean to Peter, telling him that Daniel is actually Ella's father.  Not only does he say that he's always known, but he forgives her.  It's a beautifully written scene and devastatingly acted by Peet, made all the more impactful when it's revealed to be a fantasy, cutting back a few minutes later to show Julia not actually confessing.

Eventually, the weight of her secret-keeping gets the best of Julia.  Throughout the episode, she's suffering from some sort of dyspepsia, as she's shown chugging Maalox during various scenes.  This lands her in the hospital near the end, after her stomach pains overpower her at the dinner with the in-laws.  It's only then that she does get her moment of absolution, as Ella makes it clear that she knows Daniel is her real father when the two of them share some time alone in the hospital room.  The idea of Julia facing physical troubles as a reaction to the emotions that she's repressing isn't exactly a subtle bit of symbolism, but it's worth it for the simplicity with which it plays the final moments between Julia and Ella.

"Expectation" is a tricky episode, one that I wasn't entirely sure what to make of throughout the majority of its runtime.  But it's the kind of story that locks into place so thoroughly in those last 10 minutes that it retroactively causes what comes before it to glue together. There's a beautiful sense of symmetry, opening on mother and daughter in bitter conflict and closing on the two of them having a quiet moment of recognition, with past and present swirling together in the middle.  The 90-minute runtimes might have been fine for the previous three outings, but this installment's neat structure makes a strong case for the hourlong format.


Bonus Points
-This episode was written by the great Semi Chellas.  Anybody who knows how militant Matt Weiner is about writing credits knows it's quite a surprise to not see a shared credit.  But aside from the Jacquemettons (whom we've yet to see), Chellas was the Mad Men writer who seemed to get the most free reign in the latter seasons of that show, so it's clear that Weiner trusts her abilities.  And indeed, this episode does have a slightly warmer voice than the previous three.

-Amanda Peet is so terrific in this.  I've always loved her ability to juggle an easygoing, effortless charm with the tightly coiled energy that often lies under the surface of her characters.  She gets so much out of micro-expressions throughout the episode, particularly when she's steeling herself the moment before she greets Ella's in-laws at the airport.

-Last week I gave a movie recommendation, so I'll throw out another one this week: Please Give.  It shares alot of the same themes regarding aging, motherhood, and our duty to be charitable to others.  And it also stars Amanda Peet!  It's one of my favorite films of the decade.

-This episode is still not as big of a John Slattery showcase as some Mad Men fans would like, but at least it's more than the cameo he got in "The Royal We."  His storyline here is similar to his character's situation with Joan on Mad Men, and Slattery even gets in a Roger Sterling-like quip with "apparently you're supposed to save some sort of cat" when talking about screenwriting.

-Affairs are a huge motif on this series.  Every episode has featured an affair of some sort.  And Mad Men was a very affair-heavy show too.  What's going on, Matt Weiner?

-Again, this is a show that richly rewards revisiting.  On my second viewing the breakfast scene between Julia and Ella, which was already my favorite scene in the episode, becomes even more layered.  Knowing what we know by the end, it becomes very clear that Ella's needling of Julia about her self-righteousness is about the fact that she knows who her real father is.  The first time around, Ella seems like a spoiled brat, but the second time around she has a little bit more of a point.

-Amazon's description of this episode is just "Over a single day in New York City a woman is confronted with every single lie she ever told" which is just very funny to me for some reason.

The Romanoffs - "House of Special Purpose" review

Part of the joy of The Romanoffs being an anthology series is that it can really be anything it wants to be.  Sure, it has to include the hook of the show's premise -- having a character who believes themselves to be a descendant of the Romanov family -- but that's less limiting than it initially appears.  It's just a jumping off point for these stories about humanity.  More importantly, the anthology nature allows the show to pull off any genre or tone from week to week.  That's not to say Matt Weiner didn't do his fair share of experimentation on Mad Men, in episodes like the non-linear "Far Away Places" and the pitch black horror of "Mystery Date."  But it was still a show that was tied to certain limitations of plot and character.  With The Romanoffs, it has the freedom to completely reset, which is exciting when you're working with a creator like this.

So reset it does with "House of Special Purpose," which initially appears to be one of those Hollywood insider stories that creators love to make, despite the limited audience relatability.  We're introduced to actress Olivia Rogers (Christina Hendricks), who's opening an envelope with a script for a television series called The Romanovs.  Apparently she's coming on to the project late, replacing the previous actress playing Alexandra Romanov, who she is told was fired.  So there's already that meta nature of Hendricks playing a character in The Romanoffs who's playing a character in a show called The Romanovs, but the episode is also littered with tons of inside baseball about the nature of producing TV, including references to shooting out of order, getting last minute script revisions, and hitting marks.  Olivia even has a winking meta line in the middle of the episode where says, "How are you going to have a Romanov show where there's no murder?  That's all anyone knows about them."

Once on the set, Olivia meets Jacqueline Gerard (Isabelle Huppert), the director on the project.  Jacqueline is a legendary actress, one who served as an inspiration to Olivia when she was growing up, but she's past the point in her career where she could star in a vehicle like this.  So her path to legitimacy now involves directing, but it's clear that there's a part of her that longs for a time when she was on the other side of the camera.  She makes all of these pointed remarks like "I cannot play all the parts!" when the actors aren't giving her what she wants, always especially resentful towards Olivia and her choices.  Here, the story is reminiscent of the film Clouds of Sils Maria from a few years ago, another narrative where an actress must confront her aging when she has to act in a play in which she played the younger role 20 years earlier.  The portions of the episode focusing on that tension between Olivia and Jacqueline take on that same heady, reflexive nature of Clouds.  The stakes are high for both of these women: for Jacqueline, it's because she's trying to prove herself in this new phase of her career (she had to lie and say she's a Romanov descendant just to get the job); for Olivia, it's because she's trying to regain momentum after the passing of her mother and walking away from this difficult project could be a career-ender.

All along the way, there are odd elements that pepper the story with increasing frequency.  It starts with that foggy establishing shot of the hotel Olivia is staying in, which makes it looks like a haunted Victorian manor.  Then, Olivia is visited in the dead of night by the ghost of Anastasia Romanov, who smells of gasoline and vanishes into the closet (a nod to the urban legend that Anastasia escaped and survived while the rest of her family was murdered).  The episode has fun with this bizarre horror tone it attempts to strike, often playing the terror through the lens of a world gone awry.  At many points it seems like everyone but Olivia is working against all logic and reason, like her scene partner breaking into song and being praised as if it was a normal take.  There's also the hotel concierge, who initially lies to Olivia about there being a bar at the hotel, and then treats her with aloofness and disdain when it's revealed that there is a bar and that she's the bartender.

But the most potent section of the episode is when it really tries to dig into what it means to be a woman in the film and television industry.  Every episode of the series so far has dealt with sexual impropriety in some way, but this one tackles it head-on when Olivia's co-star Samuel Ryan (Jack Huston) goes off-script and sexually assaults her in a scene.  It's a clear abuse of the power dynamic between scene partners, but it's all just bushed off as okay, and worth it because it draws a fiery performance from Olivia.  It's a moment that, intentionally or not, is hard not to draw parallels with Matt Weiner's own workplace transgressions.  "House of Special Purpose" is co-written by Mary Sweeney, the first woman to have her name on an episode of the show, and it feels very informed by a female perspective as well.

Olivia is at her most complicated and absorbing when she's put in these uncomfortable positions, faced with absurdity and animosity and being forced to greet it with a level head, for fear of seeming unaccommodating.  It's a real joy to see Christina Hendricks, who was great on Mad Men but rarely gets used properly anywhere else, get another meaty role to play.  Being able to feed off a legend like Isabelle Huppert seems to have given her alot of inspiration, because it might be her best performance yet.  The scene between the two of them after the investor's dinner, where they are commiserating over the hardships of being a woman in the industry, is an episode highlight because of the chemistry the two of them have when they share a scene and let their guards down.

But that bond is short-lived once things go out of wack all over again.  First, Olivia sees Samuel get mysteriously hauled off in a van in the middle of the night, in a moment that visually mirrors an earlier scene where the two of them watch his character's dead body being disposed of.  (The only explanation that gets offered the next morning is that Samuel wrapped filming early.)  Then Jacqueline shows up to set late and eerily playing some sort of character, eventually getting production shut down.  This is an episode that constantly plays with the notion of what is real and what is not.  What was the true nature of the departure of the previous actress who played Alexandra?  Did Olivia really see the ghost of Anastasia?  Was Jacqueline really possessed by the spirit of a Romanov at the investor's dinner?

And it makes one last play at that reality questioning for Olivia.  She's awoken in the middle of the night by her castmates in costume, except when she objects to them aggressively urging her to come with them, they stay in character.  She's spirited away with violence and hostility, eventually ending up at The House of Special Purpose.  There, everyone still remains in character as she watches in horror while they get gunned down.  Ultimately, the shock is too much for her and she collapses to the floor.  We see a close-up on a puddle of blood next to her body and in its reflection there are the telltale studio lights, followed by "cut."  Everybody's ecstatic -- they've nailed the big moment.  But the episode concludes with a close-up on the blank stare of Olivia, who died due to this stunt.

Now, is Olivia really dead?  Ultimately, it doesn't matter to the point the episode is trying to make.  All throughout "House of Special Purpose," characters are telling Olivia that she is unwilling to lose herself in the role, to really do what it takes to hone in on this performance.  That final moment represents her finally being engulfed so fully into character that she even takes on Alexandra's state of mortality.  Whether Olivia is actually dead or not, everyone around her thinks the level of debasement they put her through was worth it for the sake of great art.

"House of Special Purpose" is a corker, one that proves The Romanoffs is not only capable of shifting genre from episode to episode, but it can also put on various masks within the same story.  It's an episode that keeps the audience on its toes in terms of what it's doing and where it's going, a deliberate choice to make us empathize with what Olivia is going through.  And the point we land on is a potent one, the idea that the ordinary world often looks like a horror show when you're not in a position of power.


Bonus Points
-I looked up co-writer Mary Sweeney's credits after watching the episode and I learned that on top of being a writer, she used to serve as an editor on most of David Lynch's work.  All of a sudden this episode makes much more sense.

-When the cast list was first announced for the show, I was impressed with the sheer star power of the ensemble, but the thing that blew me away the most was the fact that Matt Weiner got Isabelle Huppert.  She's a legend, and it feels like she's having a blast in this episode.

-The episode has two different scenes of bodies being disposed of.  There are a few references about actors being infinitely replaceable too.  It makes you think that Olivia's death will just be passed over, since there will always be another ingenue to step into her place.

-"I don't know how to say this, but I really respond to praise" feels like such a Mad Men line.  I half expected a "that's what the money is for!" thrown back in response.

-I named-checked Clouds of Sils Maria in the review, but the episode also feels like another Olivier Assayas film: Personal Shopper.  The way it never truly lets you know just how much of Jacqueline's actions in the second half are her playing games with Olivia and how much there is something genuinely other-worldly happening with her is one of the most fascinating threads.

-A second watch really clarified the episode's themes around the looseness of identity, from Samuel's method approach to Jacqueline telling that story of talking to herself in the mirror as a kid to become another person.

-Many critics cited this as their favorite out of the three episodes that were sent to them for review.  I'd say this is maybe my least favorite so far.  Still, it's a terrific episode that really rose in estimation for me when I rewatched it while writing this review.

The Romanoffs - "The Royal We" review

John Cheever is a huge influence on Matthew Weiner.  In a 2014 interview with the New York Times, Weiner was quoted as saying, "Cheever has a voice filled with irony and comedy and pain that, on some level, I'm always seeking to emulate."  But even without getting it straight from the horse's mouth, one could watch just a single episode of Mad Men and see how the preeminant writer on suburban malaise informs the lives of its characters, particularly when they're outside of the walls of Sterling Cooper etc.  And without the plot framework of the advertising world, Weiner has decided to go full Cheever with The Romanoffs.

More so than "The Violet Hour," "The Royal We" captures that sense of irony and comedy and pain, as it introduces the ultimate tale of suburban malaise.  We meet Michael and Shelly Romanoff (Corey Stoll and Kerry Bishe), a married couple in the midst of a couples therapy session.  It's implied that their troubles stem from a lack of communication and listening, as Shelly speaks about an observation regarding relationships that she heard in a movie while Michael blankly stares out the window and fusses with some trinket on the couch's end table.  At the suggestion of the therapist, the couple decides to go on a cruise together.  But when Michael gets stuck in jury duty, an ensuing fight facilitates Shelly's decision to go on the cruise as a solo trip.

What follows are the twin journeys of Michael and Shelly during their respective days apart.  During the trial, Michael becomes fixated on a beautiful woman named Michelle (Janet Montgomery) on the jury, whom he first spotted during the preliminary selection process.  Weiner and co-writer Michael Goldbach paint his obsession as a bit of comedic buffoonery -- he doesn't even know anything about this woman and yet he blows off paying attention to the evidence and testimonies of the trial to draw pictures of her shoe, in lieu of taking notes.  Which makes it even more hilarious when he's the only person to vote not guilty in what should be a clear-cut deliberation, in order to spend more time in the presence of this woman.  He reasons that "this is a man's life at stake."  But he doesn't actually care about this man's life, or else he would have been more attentive during the court proceedings.  There's something almost sad about Michael's sense of desperation.

Meanwhile, Shelly is on this cruise that we find out is specifically for Romanov descendants.  She's an outsider in this inherited world, as she's only a Romanov by marriage to Michael.  Just her luck, she meets a fellow cruise attendee (played by Noah Wyle) who's also only there because his spouse who couldn't make it is a Romanov.  Here, the show returns back to its ideations on family history, as the two of them casually discuss their background.  Shelly says she's a mixture of Scottish and various other things, then finishing it off with a dismissive "who really gives a shit?"  Only everyone else on this boat.

What makes "The Royal We" special is how it places these two stories next to one another.  As much as we've seen the lack of connection between Michael and Shelly's relationship when they're together, the stories of them apart seem to work in a rhythm.  Match cuts transition from Michael's story to Shelly's and vice versa, as we see Michelle take a puff from her cigarette just as Shelly is lighting hers miles away.  The episode is full of these narrative daisy chains; it moves so smoothly and fluidly.  They're on parallel journeys almost every step of the way, as each of them contemplate cheating on one another with a person they just met.

Each of their stories play like they're acting out their biggest fantasies, and it's quite the insight into their characters.  Michael's is a mixture of power fantasy and hero narrative.  He meets this beautiful woman, goes on a crime-solving adventure, and brings her to his remote cabin in the woods to sleep with her.  And in the cabin he plays the role of the aggressive type, coming on so strong until she's overpowered by his masculine aura.  It's like something out of a letter to a men's magazine.  Shelly, on the other hand, finds a companion where her husband couldn't be there for her.  (Pointedly, he sits in a seat at dinner assigned for Michael, metaphorically assuming his rule.)  Earlier in the therapy session, Shelly mentions that all she really wants is for her and Michael to do something together that they can both enjoy.  And she gets that in the form of Ivan.  He takes in this bizarre cruise spectacle with Shelly, he's kind to her, and most importantly, he listens to her as she tells him what's on her mind.

For the difference between Michael and Shelly, it's a question of who understands the narrative they're in.  Shelly ultimately doesn't sleep with Ivan, stopping things short at a kiss they share in front of her room door.  She knows that this is a vacation, both literally and symbolically.  A tryst at sea is not going to solve her problems on the land.  And, perhaps naively, she thinks Michael is home doing no wrong.  That's when we cut back to Michael, who isn't even aware that he's in a story that's been told a million times before.  Because of the kind of man he is, wrapped up in his middle-aged self-pity, he thinks his feelings are unique and special, that he's found the real deal with Michelle.

Aside from in the professional prowess and general debonair departments, Michael isn't all that different from a Don Draper type, running to the first sign of a new beginning.  He becomes attached to Michelle and the idea of leaving Shelly, so much so that he latches on to an offhand remark made when Michelle tries to end things permanently, and he gets his mind set on murdering his wife and making it look like an accident.  All of this to be with a woman who he's somehow convinced will fix his unhappiness with life.  As he takes Shelly out on a hike with the intention of offing her, it feels like the story has taken a turn for the shallow, less like Cheever and more like an airport novel.

But I shouldn't have doubted Weiner's ability to zig when I expect him to zag.  And zag he does -- Michael pushes Shelly off of a small ledge, only for her to catch herself and survive with only a few scratches and a sprained ankle.  As much as he tries to convince her it was an accident, she knows he just tried to kill her and it gives her the clarity she needed the whole time.  It's here that we realize once and for all that this is not Michael's story of middle-aged discontent.  The camera follows Shelly as she rides off into the sunset away from him, and reveals that it's actually her story of self-actualization.

Ultimately, that's what makes "The Royal We" land so well.  It takes what we know about the tropes of the mid-life crisis story and Weiner's influences, and completely turns it on its head.  It's a total subversion of the Cheever formula.  Kill your ancestors, the time to embark on a new path has arrived.


Bonus Points
-Kerry Bishe is one of my favorite actors, with my love stretching from her incredible turn as Donna on Halt and Catch Fire all the way back to her appearance in the pilot of Virtuality, the 2009 sci-fi series that never came to fruition.  And it's an absolute dream come true to see her act in a Matt Weiner show.  She's such an open and vulnerable performer, and I love the range she shows in Shelly's arc across this episode.

-Characters discussing their level of happiness is a recurring motif here.  Michael advises a student at the college prep center that nobody is happy, when he really means that he's not happy.  Michelle decides to let her affair with him be just an affair because she's happy with the life she's already living.  And Shelly doesn't sleep with Ivan because she thinks she's happy with Michael, only to learn by the end that she has room to be even happier without him.

-A detail I just noticed as I was taking notes: In an episode about how what we see in people is often just a reflection of what we want, the name Michelle is very close to being a reflection of Michael.  And it's also a variant of Shelly.

-One of the big accusations against this show so far is that the stories are thin, but I couldn't disagree with that sentiment more.  It's a dense show on first watch, and there were so many details that I only picked up on during a rewatch.  For instance, I realized during my second watch that Michael didn't just end up on the jury.  He purposely didn't tank the questioning because of Michelle.

-The all-too-brief cameo from John Slattery in this episode is the ultimate flex.

-I love Matthew Weiner and almost all of his choices, but the Kendrick Lamar "DNA" needle drop was awful and feels as out of place as the time "Infanta" by The Decemberists played during an episode of Mad Men.

-I didn't get to touch on lineage as much in the review but it's interesting that in the final therapy session, Shelly says that finding out more about Michael's bloodline on the cruise made her understand what made him the way he is.  That's a fascinating idea to keep in mind throughout the rest of these episodes.  Michael's troubles in this episode feel less like a genetic disposition and more like your boilerplate sadsack loserdom.  But perhaps there's something Romanovian in his inability to realize that about himself, much like Anushka and Greg in "The Violet Hour" didn't have the self-awareness to realize the emptiness of their resolutions.

The Romanoffs - "The Violet Hour" review

It's tough for a TV creator to follow up their masterwork, to be expected to deliver another success after making something that captures the culture and achieves critical acclaim.  Some play it safe and return to the world they know (Vince Gilligan making Better Call Saul after finishing Breaking Bad), some venture off into the world of film (David Chase directing Not Fade Away years after The Sopranos ended), and others have flopped (John From Cincinnati, David Milch's post-Deadwood failure).  This is the predicament Matthew Weiner found himself in upon Mad Men's completion in 2015.  After coming up in the trenches of writers' rooms for other people's shows, he branched out on his own and made one of the greatest dramas of all time.  But could he do it again?

Enter The Romanoffs.  It came pitched with the odd premise of "an anthology series on Amazon Prime where every episode centers on a different set of people who believe themselves to be descendants of Russian royal family the Romanovs."  With that description, married with its reportedly astronomical budget, and heat against Weiner due to allegations regarding his sexual harassment of a former writer on the Mad Men staff, it felt like the energy surrounding the show had all the makings of it being a massive failure.  Well now the first two episodes have been made available -- with the rest of the installments dropping one at a time every Friday -- and everyone can see for themselves.

The first of the two episodes is an 84-minute affair titled "The Violet Hour."  The France-set episode introduces us to Anushka (Marthe Keller) an elderly woman who is being rushed to the hospital for an incident related to high blood pressure.  Once she's there, her American nephew Greg (Aaron Eckhart) comes to her aide.  Right off the bat, we get one of those classic Matthew Weiner lines that's economical, witty, and character revealing all in one go: when Greg asks the doctor for the prognosis, he retorts "Even hypochondriacs get sick sometimes."  The episode paints a clear picture of Greg not long after, as we quickly learn that he is basically the only family Anushka has left, and he and his French girlfriend are waiting for her to pass away so they can inherit her swanky Parisian apartment.

Not to be outdone by her nephew's vulture circling, Anushka's got some personal flaws of her own.  She operates with a curtness and sense of entitlement, and never has a shortage of vitriol to throw in any direction.  This amplifies with the appointment of a new maid in her apartment, a Muslim woman named Hajar, which causes conflict because, well, Anushka is racist as hell.  She's constantly making assumptions about Hajar's heritage and overall level of class due to her skin color and religious background, casually cruel in a way that makes clear this is a deeply ingrained mindset.  But eventually she does find space to not be completely bigoted and dismissive around the halfway point of the episode, when we finally loop back to the series' central premise, as Anushka tells Hajar of her connection to the Romanov family.  Earlier in the episode, Hajar's eye is caught by a gorgeous jeweled egg in the dining room, which Anushka now tells her is a family heirloom.  What's more is that it belonged to the Romanov family and traveled to France before they were all murdered.  It's a symbol of their wealth and stature, "the family bank," as Anushka describes.  But once France was under Nazi occupation during World War II, the egg was stolen and had to be replaced with a fake.

"The Violet Hour" ponders all manner of lineage and class throughout its run.  For instance, Anushka always makes jabs about Hajar being a foreigner but Hajar was, in fact, born in France.  Hajar even has to point out to Greg that she's a native Parisian when he asks her where she's from when they first meet.  For all of Anushka's haughtiness, Hajar is just as French as she is.  Maybe even more so, because the former sequesters herself in her apartment, shielded away from the real world of Paris.  At one point, Anushka insists that she knows what it's like to be an exile, stating "I dream of Russia every night."  But the irony is that when Hajar asks her how long it's been since she was there, Anushka replies that she's never actually been.  So she's never been to Russia, her whole family is dead, and the only thing that ties her to her bloodline is a Faberge egg that isn't even real.

Again, it's an episode full of this Weiner gift, pointed bits of dialogue that sketch out a whole lifetime of character.  He can construct an exchange of conversation that carries the weight that pure plot does on other shows.  It has a spark and litheness, allowing you to not just marvel at the surface beauty of the content but the subtext of it as well.  All of that is on full display in Greg and Hajar's conversations after Anushka's spitefully changes her will to leave the apartment to Hajar.  They share a dinner and a long walk-and-talk, and the night unfolds in such a way that their eventual tryst feels both unexpected and inevitable.  What's most interesting is how close the episode plays its cards to its chest regarding each of their motivations.  We assume that Greg is trying to use his charm to seduce Hajar into giving up the apartment, but that becomes less and less clear.  Same with Hajar -- is her decision based on a desire to class-hop or genuine connection?  Ultimately, I think it lands on a fascinating brew of everything at once.

The story remains fleet-footed and surprising until the very end, where it almost turns into a broad comedy when it reveals that Hajar is pregnant with Greg's baby, causing the two of them to profess their love for one another.  It feels like something out of a Jane Austen novel, but it works because of the place it leaves all of its characters.  Greg and Hajar are left with a romance, but can it work when it's built on such a weak foundation?  Anushka gets her wish of continuing the bloodline, a fact that's only important to her.  And as a consolation prize for all of her trouble, Sophie chooses to leave with none other than that fake Faberge egg.  It's a happy ending right up until the point where you realize all anyone has is a meaningless token.

So which category does The Romanoffs fall into as a follow-up?  Most critics would have you believe that it's a failure, with many calling it thin and self-indulgent.  But after "The Violet Hour," I'm inclined to believe that it's a rousing success.  It's a terrific example of Matthew Weiner applying Mad Men's writing style to a slightly more flexible frame, and he shows that he's still one of the best at creating wholly-realized characters and constructing stories that breathe and flow with ease.  This is an hour and a half of television that feels nimble and elegantly sculpted and so, so textured.  Bring on the next six weeks.


Bonus Points
-I'd be a fool if I didn't give a shout out to the opening credits, which start out elegantly and refined before turning into a bloodbath soundtracked by "Refugee" from Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers.  Mad Men has one of the most iconic opening credits of the century, so it can't quite match that, but this one is pretty bold and interesting in its own right.

-I'm no expert, but Aaron Eckhart French seemed pretty good.  The moment when he mispronounces Hajar as "Hagar" is one of the funniest parts of the episode though.

-I couldn't work it into the main body of the review but Hajar and Anushka's argument about her people being the backbone of civilization was not only a terrific scene, but an excellent tie into the episode's musings on lineage and class.

The underrated Nicole Holofcener returns with The Land of Steady Habits

Longtime readers of this blog know how much of a Nicole Holofcener fan I am.  The sublime indie writer-director is known for taking long gaps between her films, and while this still holds true, she's actually been quite active since the release of her previous feature, 2013's excellent Enough Said.  In the time since then, she's had a number of jobs directing episodes of TV shows like Togetherness, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Orange is the New Black, while also penning the scripts for 2014's Every Secret Thing and this month's Can You Ever Forgive Me?  But the only way to experience the full power of Holofcener's prowess is through a project where she's responsible for the writing and directing, and in that sense, her newest film, The Land of Steady Habits is her first mainline film in five years.  For a superfan like myself this was an absolute event, and I treated it as such, watching it shortly after it premiered on Netflix last month.

After making her name as one of the most observant and thoughtful filmmakers when it comes to the inner and outer lives of women, she tries her hand this time around at a male protagonist.  (Perhaps an even bigger shock is the fact that this is her first feature film without longtime collaborator Catherine Keener.)  Based on a book by the same name, the film follows Anders Hill (Ben Mendelsohn), a man who finds himself restless after the twin major events of his recent divorce and an early retirement from his soul-crushing job in finance.  On its journey to find Anders' true north, the story ends up being slightly more incident-heavy and darker than what we're used to from Holofcener.  So Steady Habits clearly finds Holofcener pushing herself out of her comfort zone in small ways.

But while giving us a slightly new taste, the film still ends up feeling like classic Holofcener on a bone-deep level.  It's imbued with her usual sense of grace and wit, gliding along in its 98 minutes full of relaxed, true-to-life banter that hits the right balance of quotidian and insightful.  Her characters are always slightly brittle, uneasy folks that you somehow feel an incredible amount of warmth for and it's no different here.  Anders is another character in the Holofcener tradition, a man who is acting out of a surface frustration and dissatisfaction without fully grasping the true thing that's gnawing at him.  In a few bits of economical exposition, we learn that he retired from his job because, as he describes, it was very demanding and morally unjust.  You get the sense that it was a move he made because it would be the thing that finally made him happy.  But shortly after that, he decided to leave his wife Helene (Edie Falco) as well.  And that's where we arrive at his story, no more content or whole than he was before he blew his life up.  The whole movie is him trying to remedy the wrong ailment, not realizing that his entire sense of unease is driven by the fact that he has the rest of his life in his windshield and no idea what to do with it.

That ennui is the driving force for what is another theme that fans of Nicole Holofcener will know very well.  One of the most poignant threads of her previous film Enough Said was the B-plot between main character Eva (played by Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and her daughter's best friend, Chloe (Tavi Gevinson).  It's the summer before Eva's daughter goes away to college, and she finds herself getting attached to Chloe, who will still be around when fall starts.  It's a small, unspoken little throughline that never fully gets verbalized or confronted, but it's very clear that Eva's actions are a way of working through her anxiety that her daughter will soon be moving far away, leaving her all alone.

In a similar way, Steady Habits has Anders form a bond with Charlie (Charlie Tahan), the son of his ex-wife's best friends.  The two first encounter each other in the film at a party thrown by Charlie's parents that Anders crashes.  When Anders wanders outside, he happens upon Charlie with his friends smoking a bong, and Anders' mid-life crisis-induced odd decision-making leads him to join them, where he learns that the marijuana is laced with PCP once he smokes it.  Charlie overdoses later in the night and must be taken to the hospital -- just another chapter in his apparent battle with drugs.  The wayward relationship between Anders and Charlie ends up forming much of the skeleton of the film's back half.  Not only is it a situation that gives us further evidence of how adrift Anders feels in his life, it takes on even more significance when viewed alongside his relationship with his own son, Preston (Thomas Mann).  See, Preston has his own issues with addiction -- a past stint in rehab gets mentioned a few times in conversation -- and his life isn't exactly in order, as he's chosen to loaf around after graduating college.  Anders has a decent enough relationship with his son, yet he seems to inadvertently spend so much time with Charlie.

Is Anders drawn to Charlie because he sees Preston in him?  Is it a way to not actually deal with his own son's problem?  Is he grasping on to any thread from his previous life, however tenuous?  Does Anders even know why he does what he does?  It's a series of questions that Steady Habits asks the audience to ponder, and that mystery is what makes him such a compelling protagonist.

What makes the film so special is that it's not wholly Anders' story though.  Holofcener has a way of distributing her narratives in a generous fashion, spreading them out wide enough to touch a myriad of supporting characters and their lives.  Some critics, like Indiewire's David Ehrlich, took issue with the way she seems to have her attention on so many different threads in this one, but I love the way that every character and subplot add to the general idea that the film is trying to express.  It's a story about the life unlived, ruminating on everything from what parents and children owe each other to whether it's worthwhile to steer your existence in another direction when you've already spent so much of it going one way, and every new branch that explores those themes just deepens the roots of Anders' struggles.

In previous works like Please Give and Walking and Talking, Holofcener has favored happier endings for her characters.  They go through their trials, but they tend to come away from those situations with a better understanding of themselves, their place in the world, and how they relate to those they love the most.  The Land of Steady Habits, then, is a bold turn in that regard.  Charlie dies of another overdose towards the end of the film and is found by Preston alone in the woods, a grim flash for the latter of what could've happened if a few things went differently in his own life.  And everything comes to a head at a dinner between the two families, where Charlie's parents learn that Anders was the last person to see Charlie, and that he let Charlie run off instead of calling to inform them that he had broken out of the hospital.  It's a bleak climax, one that's made all the more fascinating because what follows is pretty ambiguous in regards to Anders' growth as a person.  Months pass and everyone attempts to move on with their lives, with Anders continuing to date the woman he met earlier in the film (played by the great Connie Britton) while also looking after the turtle Charlie left him.  Holofcener loves a symbolic token, and the turtle is just another one in a long line of them.  Instead of leaving Anders with a lesson learned, it presents him with a more difficult task, the choice to learn a lesson from everything that just happened to him.

This is a film that doesn't seem to have landed with too many critics out there.  Nicole Holofcener isn't exactly a widely celebrated filmmaker, but she has certainly carved out a niche for fans, and even many of those people consider her latest to be a minor misstep.  However, the film and its ending in particular walloped me.  The Lands of Steady Habits sits right alongside the rest of her sterling filmography; it's another work that gives us a view of her considerable ability to sketch out the lives and psychologies of characters in simple, fluid strokes.  And in its small storytelling risks, it points toward exciting new avenues for her to explore as a filmmaker.  Hopefully this won't be the last time Netflix provides her with money to do her thing.  There aren't many others out there who can make a specific gem like this.