By Jack Giroux/March 2, 2017 1:30 pm EST
Below, learn more about the new Matthew Weiner show.
Weiner shared plenty of new details about the show, starting with the fact that he’s collaborating with some of his co-workers from his Mad Men days. Some of that drama’s executive producers, Semi Chellas and Andre and Maria Jacquemetton, are involved in The Romanoffs, while Mad Men producer, Blake McCormick, is acting as Weiner’s producing partner on The Romanoffs.
Weiner may even get an actor or two from his AMC seriesM to appear in his new project. Each episode focuses on a new character, so like Black Mirror – which Weiner credits for helping him to explain his new show to people, although they’re very different – one episode is not a huge time commitment for an actor. Each episode is structured almost like an hour long movie, with a beginning, middle, and end.
Weiner likes having to “commit to a resolution”:
The storyteller thought of the idea for the series a year ago. A year after the Bolsheviks took over Russia in 1917, they executed the exiled the last emperor of Russia, Czar Nicholas II, Empress Alexandra, and all of their five children. But there’s the story that their daughter, Anastasia, survived and lived out her remaining days under a new identity. Weiner isn’t making a history lesson, though. This is the story he wants to tell:
I liked the idea of telling a story in a format where you don’t have the serial element – you have to commit to a resolution. The escalation has to happen within the story — nothing is carried over from one episode to another. As a writer, that’s an exciting idea.
We’re at a place in our history where people are looking for a close connection to their roots, and for some kind of revelation about who they are. There’s great debate about who is a Romanoff and what happened to the Romanoffs. The story for me is that we’re all questioning who we are and who we say we are.
