Dispatches from elsewhere: A review of Taylor Swift's "folklore"

For a while if you were a Taylor Swift fan, there was one certainty in life: a new album of hers would come out in the fall of an even-numbered year.  And though that pattern was finally broken during the three-year break between 2014's 1989 and 2017's Reputation, the two-year gap returned with the release of Lover last year.  The general idea seemed to be that if you wanted a new Taylor Swift album, you'd need to wait at least two years.  That's why it was particularly shocking to wake up on July 23, 2020 to a social media post from her announcing that not only was she dropping a new album, but that it was coming out at midnight.  Now that folklore has been in the world for a little over a week, it's finally time to plumb its depths.

It's an interesting time in Swift's life, as she's now 30 years old, a milestone that can cause anyone to spiral, let alone a former teen star whose appeal has often been centered around her youthfulness and prodigy status.  We also happen to be living in a complicated time in the United States, suffering the worst effects of a global pandemic and going stir crazy from months of self-isolation.  This personal upheaval and a larger global upheaval both appear to have contributed to the themes and stark black-and-white aesthetic of folklore, which seems to be written from the perspective of someone who's finally letting the sheer accumulation of life dawn on them.  Album opener "the 1" serves as a tone-setter in that regard, as she sorts through thoughts about a former partner and ponders how things could have been different between them.  "You know the greatest films of all time were never made," she sings at one point, which feels like a key to understanding the whole album.  It's a record obsessed with sliding doors, what ifs, and lost time.  The longer you're on this earth, the more there are lives unlived that branch out from your path of reality, and it's a concept she reflects on often in these 16 new tracks.

Folklore embraces the idea of its title in the literal sense, offering up tales of the nouveau riche, visions of war, and ballads about mournful ghosts. On these tracks, she plays the role of a raconteur with a 360 degree view of everything, taking these creative writing exercises and transforming them into vivid, compassionate narratives.  But as always, she also finds a way to turn things inward.  This is an album filled with totems and memories, and Swift weaves them all together into the idea that our personal history is a form of folklore itself.

She's able to accomplish this because she is one of the most cogent communicators of emotion out there, able to put a finger on complex, tangled thoughts and translate them into fragrant phrases that bore into your brain.  Here she is on "this is me trying," describing a lost love she can't stop thinking about: "You're a flashback in a film reel on the one screen in my town."  On "seven," reflecting back on the freedom of childhood: "Please picture me in the weeds / Before I learned civility / I used to scream ferociously / Any time I wanted."  The imagery on "august" is so rich you can basically feel the heat of an endless summer day and being "twisted in bedsheets."  And she always knows how to add the perfect descriptors to make a line really pop.  It's not just a high, it's a "dwindling, mercurial high."  The wedding wasn't just charming, it was "charming, if a little gauche."

Swift's gift as a lyricist is nothing new, but some of the sounds she's playing with this time around are.  When the shock of the surprise album announcement wore off, the next biggest thing to process was the fact that 11 of the 16 songs on folklore would be co-produced by The National's Aaron Dessner.  His signature plaintive piano, stately guitar lines, and gently stirring strings are all over this album, to the point where it basically sounds like a new National album if Taylor Swift were the lead singer instead of Matt Berninger.  Swift has had an unlimited budget since around 2010, but even still, her music has never sounded as good as it does in Dessner's hands.  Regular collaborator Jack Antonoff contributes production on the other five songs, and even though he plays a smaller role, it's still crucial.  He knows the contours of her strengths so well at this point that he's able to coax her trademarks out of her when Dessner is busy pushing her to new territory.  And though you can usually differentiate the Dessner songs (usually from the piano sounds) from the Antonoff ones (typically by the way he adds reverb to the vocals), the styles mesh surprisingly well.

If anything, though, the work that these two producers do on this only prove the skills we've known to be possessed by the person at the center all along.  Folklore is The Taylor Swift Show through and through.  At the end of the day good songwriting always prevails, and she's able to graft her crafty song construction and playful language games over just about any sound.  She brings her sense memory-evoking skills to the Cranberries-esque "august," shows her talent for wringing out the head-spinning feeling of being in love through an off-kilter metaphor on "mirrorball," and spills naked emotions all over the bluesy "peace."  The album is astonishing in its sheer amount of killer songs, including some of the best she's ever written, like "invisible string," a gorgeous, tightly written rumination on the vagaries of life that bring us together.

I used to wonder what Taylor Swift's music would look like once she got older, and even had a little bit of doubt about she whether she could sustain herself creatively past 30.  But of course, the signs were always there that she was more of musical chameleon than anybody gave her credit for.  If she could sound like herself over moon-eyed country ballads like "Tim McGraw," dubstep drops on "I Knew You Were Trouble," and the 80s nostalgia pop of "I Wish You Would," it makes sense that she would continue to evolve without much struggle. And her last two albums have shown that her ability to render universal thoughts and feelings aren't exclusive to teen emotions.  This time around her musings don't have the raw immediacy of her early work, but they've been replaced by a cooler, top-down perspective that's different, yet just as interesting.  Last year's Lover proved that she's hadn't lost her pop songwriting abilities, but folklore finds herself stretching in fascinating ways.  If it's any indication, this next decade of Taylor Swift music is going to be thrilling.

(Also if you'd like to read my ranking of each song on folklore, check out this Letterboxd post.)

Better Call Saul finds another gear in its fifth and best season

It's hard to imagine feeling so right now, but Better Call Saul seemed like a monumentally bad idea when it was first announced.  Spinoffs are, more often than not, creatively bankrupt cash grabs and making one for a beloved series like Breaking Bad ran the risk of souring people on the whole franchise.  Luckily, the series has proven that no matter what challenge you put in front of this creative team they'll churn out great television.

Though while it was always terrific on a purely technical and objective level, the show never was able to engender the kind of intense fervor that its predecessor was able to for me.  I've always really liked Better Call Saul, but I loved Breaking Bad.  All of that changed in the former's excellent fifth season, which just concluded its thrilling ride earlier this week.

Saul has always been two shows in one, with Jimmy and Kim living out their morality plays in one corner and Mike and Gus embroiled in the power plays of the Albuquerque drug trade in another corner.  Both were pretty compelling, though the drug half often suffered from prequel-itis more than its counterpart, simply going through the motions to put things in the place of Breaking Bad's starting point.  Now that those two halves have merged, season five felt like the series was finally humming along and realizing its full potential.  Previously the show's two modes conversed with each other only on a thematic level -- the entire universe is populated by people chiseling away at the list of things they are unwilling to do -- but it's way more electric when they're actually intertwining on a literal level.

Last season saw Jimmy finally adopting the Saul Goodman moniker, and this year his slide into the inevitable accelerated at a rapid pace, becoming a "friend of the cartel" and getting tangled up with wildcard Lalo Salamanca.  The intersection of the legal and cartel hemispheres of the world led to one of the season's best episodes, "Bagman," where Jimmy's mission to pick up Lalo's seven million dollars of bail money turns into a grisly shootout, followed by a long sojourn in the desert with Mike.  It's an episode that recalled Breaking Bad's classic "4 Days Out" -- surely not a coincidence that Vince Gilligan, who has ceded day-to-day control of Saul to Peter Gould, returned to direct this hour -- blending all of this creative team's strengths together.  It's at once full of nailbiting tension, atmospheric patience, and ingenious plotting.  One of the things that's admirable about Better Call Saul is that it has thoroughly staked out its own identity, so it almost feels wrong to praise the show for injecting some more Breaking Bad into its veins, but it's hard to deny that it sings when working in that style.

The fact that it's a prequel has always loomed over the show narratively.  At the end of the day, we know where the show's going to end up.  A problem that frequently plagues prequels is that it's hard to invest in what you're watching since it's all in service of a known endpoint.  Better Call Saul has circumvented this in two ways.  The first is simple: it has made the audience savor the journey through its sheer craft and leaning into the clockwork fatalism that was even baked into Breaking Bad instead of running away from it.  But more importantly, it knows that because we're largely aware of how things end, it can wring out tension and emotion from homing in on the unknown variables in the equation.

It's not a surprise that this season Kim, Nacho, and Lalo were the most compelling characters to follow.  We know the broad strokes of what can and can't happen to the likes of Jimmy, Gus and Mike, which makes the open possibilities of anything involving Kim, Nacho, Lalo feel all the more gutwrenching.  Lalo's status as a chaos agent is amplified by the fact that he's an invention of Better Call Saul and we therefore have no idea what he'll do next.  Meanwhile, Nacho's role as a double agent and his desire to get out of the game has even higher stakes knowing that he may not be long for this world.

Where this pays the biggest dividends, however, is with Kim.  She's been the show's best character from the outset, partially because it's hard not to be when Rhea Seehorn is giving a pantheon performance playing her, but Kim's only gotten more fascinating as the show has gone on and toyed with our perception of how things could turn out for her.  Most people just assumed in the beginning that things would eventually end poorly between her and Jimmy once his full evolution into Saul Goodman was complete.  What season five did was reveal a failure of imagination within all of us.  From suggesting that she and Jimmy get married once he gets involved with the cartel to her confronting Lalo head-on when he imposes on them in their home, Kim was constantly upending our expectations.  It seemed as if truly anything could happen with her in these 10 episodes.  Would she leave Jimmy after he finally did something to cross the line?  Would she get killed right on the spot when Lalo shows up at their doorstep?

The actual answer is simpler and more tragic.  Though she's always found thrills in Jimmy's grifting game, Kim has also been the closest thing the show had to a moral center.  But really, when we thought we were watching Jimmy's process of "breaking bad," this whole time we were slowly watching Kim's.  That feeling that something very obvious is being revealed before our eyes is what makes the scene where she's suggesting to Jimmy that they illegally sabotage Howard to force a resolution to the Sandpiper case makes it so heartbreaking, even more so because Jimmy seems to understand she's past the point of no return too.  The moral corrosion was always within her, Jimmy just provided the activation energy.

With next season being the show's final one, this year was the ideal penultimate season, perfectly ramping things up and setting everything in motion for an exciting conclusion.  And with the end nearing, Saul is pulling out all the stops.  We thought we were going into this show with a full map, but the brilliance of it is that it has proceeded to reveal all sorts of hidden rooms and passages we never could have imagined.

A 2000 word review of Taylor Swift's "Lover" to heal our fractured nation

In this age where we have constant access to artists and know so much about them, it's hard for reviews of albums from extremely popular musicians to not feel like a referendum on everything surrounding them.  But it seems especially hard when you have an artist like Taylor Swift.  Part of that is because she's one of the most famous people on Earth, so she has the inflated swirl of publicity and reportage that comes with that.  It's also that she's someone who puts so much of herself and her life into her music.  A Taylor Swift album and the discourse around a Taylor Swift album begin to feel like one in the same.

And the stars of discourse were not aligned for her leading up to Lover.  Despite Reputation being a pretty good album when all was said and done, and despite it having an astronomically lucrative tour, the record was seen as a bit of a failure.  On top of that, a fact that hadn't been the case for a long time was now true: Taylor Swift just isn't the biggest pop star in America anymore.  In her absence, Ariana Grande scooped up the Millennial demographic and Billie Eilish conquered the Gen Z crowd.  And it seems like reckoning with that reality caused her to scramble and make some fumbles.

The first of those fumbles was everything about initial single "ME!"  Its release was coupled with a garish music video whose vibe was completely out of step with what people are looking for these days.  Then there's her recent to decision to end her notorious silence on politics by finally coming out against Trump and in support of LGBT issues.  Obviously, it's a net positive if she inspires some young people to become political, and it's better to be late to this stuff than to never come to it at all, but it's not unreasonable for people to think it's a calculated sales move.  Adding to the feeling of calculation was the release cycle of the follow-up single, "You Need to Calm Down," in which a song that only makes one or two passing references to gay rights got a video that features a smorgasbord of queer celebrities.  It all just seemed like a flurry of weird marketing moves that got the album off on the wrong foot.

That's a shame too, because despite all of the extra-textual elements surrounding the album being rancid, Lover is unequivocally great.  Well, except no amount of initial perception could change the fact that "ME!" is a total whiff.  Its generic, Target commercial melody and instrumentation is bad enough, but the fact that it inflicts Brendon Urie on our ears when so many of us are still trying to bleach his voice from the memories of our adolescence is beyond the pale.  "You Need to Calm Down," however, is a monster pop song that sounds like it should've been a smash, and one has to wonder if people would feel more positive about it were they not annoyed with the video and Swift in general.

In interviews, she has spoken about how the aesthetics of this album are a direct reaction to Reputation's look and sound.  Soft pastels fill the art of this release, a contrast to the hard black and white of her previous record.  There's no coincidence in the fact that this album's title, Lover, is a direct inverse of her former favorite phrase "hater" either.  She was a fighter on the last album.  This time around, not so much.  Lover sloughs off the angry edges of Reputation -- instead of fixating on people who've wronged her, she's forgetting they even existed on the album's opening track.  Her only remotely Reputation-esque song is "The Man," which contemplates the gendered double standards that have plagued people's perception of her persona, but even that feels withering and even-keeled compared to the last album's agitated tracks.  Meanwhile, the rest of the album is full of slick bops that are blissed out and love-drunk.

Though maybe that's just as much of a mask as the Disney villain cosplay of Reputation.  Take "Soon You'll Get Better," which feels like the secret core of the album, as a counterpoint.  It's a devastating and sparse song about her mom's cancer -- originally diagnosed in 2015 and re-diagnosed earlier this year -- that reminds the listener that not everything in Swift's life has been a cause for celebration.  A line like "I'll paint the kitchen neon, I'll brighten up the sky / I know I'll never get it, there's not a day that I won't try" even indicates that the positive vibe on the surface of Lover is just an attempt to cope with a lingering sense of sadness.  The album is suffused with little bits of anxiety, like on "Cornelia Street" where remembrances of the time when her current love first bloomed also features the line "And baby I'm so terrified of if you ever walk away."  Things like that bubble up all over the album.  It serves to lend this otherwise happy and content album a sense of stakes, the fact that Swift is grappling with the idea that everything good in her life could suddenly all go away.

She may not have the world-conquering singing voice of an Ariana Grande or the command of mood and sound of a Billie Eilish, but one aspect where Taylor Swift continues to be unparalleled in the pop landscape is the level of sheer craft in her songs.  This album reminds you of how much of a structure wonk she is, with every song feeling like a perfectly constructed set of verses, choruses, and bridges that all fit into the tight little melodic frameworks she spins out like it's nothing.  Never is that more apparent than early favorite "Paper Rings," a song that all the algorithms in the world couldn't make more mathematically catchy.  It's a sock hop gem with undeniable melodies in its chorus and verses, that somehow manages to find another gear in its bridge.

It's in the lyrics however, where Swift truly shines and sets herself apart from her peers.  Her music has always felt like the work of someone who's a tinkerer at heart.  Every phrase is so precise and detail-heavy, written and rewritten to be the most lean and rich version of a sentiment possible.  Over her last two albums it has felt like she was moving away from that evocative style in her transition to unambiguous pop, but Lover is a return to her roots on the lyrical front.  Every line is so vivid and gorgeous, like her use of "holy orange bottles" to describe her mom's prescription pills on "Soon You'll Get Better."  She's still got that fascinating way of phrasing things: "I think he knows / His footprints on the sidewalk / Lead to where I can't stop / Go there every night."  And she paints memories with so much clarity that they unfold like real-time, present-tense moments: "I'm drunk in the back of the car / And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar / Said, 'I'm fine,' but it wasn't true / I don't wanna keep secrets just to keep you / And I snuck in through the garden gate / Every night that summer just to seal my fate."

Part of the joy of a new album from an established artist is getting another opportunity to see them play in their sandbox like that.  Her wild bridges, the breathy sighs she uses when she sings some of her lines, her last chorus adlibs -- almost all of the Taylor Swift staples appear on Lover.  And the album features some her best phrase turning ever.  There's "What doesn't kill me makes me want you more" on "Cruel Summer."  There's "My heart's been borrowed and yours has been blue / All's well that ends well to end up with you" on "Lover."  There's "We're so sad, we paint the town blue / Voted most likely to run away with you" on "Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince."  For people who really love this stuff, it's a major treat.

The left turns end up providing even more joy.  Album highlight "False God" is this low-tempo, midnight simmer that wouldn't feel out of place on an adult contemporary station, and I couldn't help but feel during the Joni Mitchell-esque stagger of words in the pre-chorus and those light saxophone stabs in the chorus the excitement of having never heard her do something like this before.  "It's Nice to Have a Friend" is another highlight in that vein.  Sounding a little like the "Cuckoo" song from Moonrise Kingdom, it blends the soft sounds of a children's choir with steel drums, and contains a bugle breakdown.  Seeing that written out feels like looking at a menu where an item has a disparate blend of ingredients, but hearing it is like having those ingredients come together for an incredible flavor.

All of the tabloid aspects of Taylor Swift's life have never been a point of interest for me, but it feels almost impossible to review this album without mentioning Joe Alwyn.  After all, he's the titular character in "London Boy," a fun and wondrously catchy song that humorless people don't seem to like much.  Alwyn is the longest relationship she's had since entering the spotlight and it's hard not to notice how much happier and healthier it feels via her songs.  On tracks like "False God" and "Afterglow," there's an entirely different approach to weathering the storm of hard times and conflict than we've ever heard from her.  There's a real sense of partnership to these songs, a desire to work things out and attain stability.  It's a far cry from the volatile approach to love we heard back in the days of "The Way I Loved You," and as someone who's listened to her music for over a decade, I can't help but be endeared by that.

So much life is inside of Lover.  There's still something very intoxicating and hopeful about the way her mind and her pen works.  It's full of "magical things" and "dazzling hazes."  She channels that energy into every type of Taylor Swift song you could want on the album's 18 tracks, and it's easy to get caught not only in the its tide of joy and excitement, but also its splashes of melancholy.

In the weeks that led up to the release of this record, I made myself comfortable with the fact that Taylor Swift's peak was over.  The creative arc of a musician is alot like an athlete's output.  Her self-titled debut was the promising rookie season, while Fearless through 1989 was her hall of fame period of dominance.  In that case, Reputation appeared to be the start of her "Lebron James on the Los Angeles Lakers" period: still good, but you can see the cracks in front of you and the best moments in the rearview.  And that was nothing to be ashamed of -- any musician would kill to have an apex as long and high as hers, and merely good Taylor Swift is still better than almost any other popular music.  But Lover is a turn-back-the-clock moment for her, a glorious accomplishment that stands right up there with her greatest work.  It's rare for a pop star's seventh album to be this thrilling, this invigorating and engaging.  The times may be passing her by, but she remains as talented as ever.

The Society cured my aversion to Netflix

I've been stricken with a very serious disease.  It's a little something called Netflix Fatigue.  Over the last few years, Netflix has become the one-stop shop for many people's viewing habits, especially those who are in my age range.  I constantly come across people who only watch Netflix, or immediately respond to a TV/film recommendation with "Is it on Netflix?"  And no offense to those people who have succumb to the convenience of Netflix -- okay, some offense: broaden your horizons, folks! -- but the way that one streaming service dictates the conversation about what we watch troubles me.  It's not just that, Netflix puts out so much content.  I'm not a binge-watcher, so the fact that they drop a new show every week with the full season available is too overwhelming to me.  If anything, something being on Netflix now makes me less likely to watch it.

If you're suffering from Netflix Fatigue like I am, it would be easy to miss out on something like The Society.  I almost did too, were it not for a pitch of the show on The Ringer's The Watch podcast that made it seem like it would be particularly up my alley.  For those who aren't in the know, here's the setup: in a well-off Connecticut town called West Ham, the high school's upperclassmen embark on a weeklong out-of-town field trip, but due to dangerous weather conditions that occur overnight while everyone is asleep, the buses must turn around and drop the kids off.  They arrive back in town to find that everyone is gone.  On top of that, the internet is out and their phones only work when they contact each other.  But the worst news of all is that all of the roads and bridges that used to lead out of town are now blocked by dense forest.  Cue the dramatic music.

That premise feels algorithmically generated in the way that alot of Netflix shows are.  Do you like Lost?  Here's another show set in an inescapable place with mysterious properties!  Do you like The Leftovers?  Here's another show where a large portion of the population has disappeared!  Do you like The 100?  Here's another show where #HotTeenz have to fend for themselves!

And at first, it's mostly just good for the thrill that comes from being reminded of those better and more original shows.  It helps, though, that the episodes are also paced pretty well, which is becoming rarer these days, especially on Netflix.  They may be an hour long but they don't feel like it all.  The first few episodes present lots of mysteries and twists that keep things moving and leave you desperate to click that "Next Episode" button, but they're not without their flaws.  You're going to have to sit through some overwrought teen angst, melodramatic love triangles, and cliche dialogue; which can be especially hard to stomach if you have a low tolerance for that kind of stuff.

But even those early episodes where they're figuring things out have that spark that comes from its thoughtful ideas about starting a community from the ground up.  Since these are privileged kids who aren't used to doing things for themselves, they have to stumble around without any framework for how to operate.  What are the rules?  How do we ration food?  How do we conserve water and electricity?  The show even gets into the little factors of society building, like the formation of committees to get various tasks done.  And in doing so, it explores interesting themes about what we owe to each other, what is the true meaning of community, and how humanity functions when it's not bound to long-held social mores.

At first, it seems like that's not the most fruitful avenue for the show to explore.  Here we have this excellent sci-fi mystery setup with so many weird and daring possibilities to take the story, yet the season puts that on the back burner for extended periods to get into the weeds of communal work shifts and city council elections.  While watching, there was a moment where it seemed like what I was most interested in was not what the show was most interested in.  But then it deepens and shows you that the inner-workings of the town of New Ham is the core of the series.  When it focuses on the drama of township, it forces its characters into gripping moral quandaries.  Watching these characters wrestle with tough choices is not only compelling, it's a way to make them more complicated than any expository monologue could.

I noticed something interesting after a few episodes while looking at the credits: almost all of the writing staff consists of women.  And sure enough, by the end of the season, I counted only one other man besides showrunner Christopher Keyser to have a writing credit.  I only mention that because it's something that shines through in the writing, where the female characters are often the most complex and are given all the tiny moments of grace.  In particular, there's Allie (played by Kathryn Newton), who rises as the de facto leader of the town and the one who has the most crises of morality throughout the season.  The Society's portrait of Allie never lands on her being wholly good or bad.  She aims to do the best for everyone but sometimes falters, making rash and morally questionable decisions.  The series goes to some dark, disturbing places but it always feels earned because it comes back to the burden that she has to bear as its grounding force.

The writing staff should also be credited for depicting an abusive relationship that doesn't lean heavily on showing violence against the woman involved.  It shows one initial act and then largely lets the dynamic play out in the emotional and psychological aftermath of the things we don't see (and don't need to due how well the actors convey the things that are shown).  Not only does it avoid becoming lurid, it emerges as one of the most gripping plotlines of the entire season.

The Society reveals those kind of ambitions more and more over the course of its first season.  While it may not quite be at the level of a Deadwood or Orange is the New Black, there's an admirable sprawl to the ensemble, with over two dozen named characters by the end of its initial ten episodes.  Like other shows with such a deep roster, it sometimes runs into trouble managing it all: certain characters completely disappear for stretches of episodes, while others never get as fleshed out as they need to be in order to have their motivations work.  And in trying to constantly ratchet up tension, the writers occasionally opt for some goofy routes -- those who have watched the series will know what I'm talking about if I just shout "THE PIE!!!"  But even with those kinks, it's simply refreshing to watch a show juggle this dense tangle of plot and character and mostly pull it off.

It's hard to tell just how much of an impact The Society has had so far.  There are only a handful of reviews on Metacritic and it doesn't seem to have much buzz on my Twitter timeline.  This is the problem with the Netflix glut of content.  There are so many options that sometimes great shows aren't able to break through.  This feels like the kind of series that could have been a sensation in a different marketplace.  Regardless, I'm happy that it made its way into my field of vision.  Season two can't come soon enough.

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.