Matthew Weiner’s Prime Video anthology, The Romanoffs, originally arrived in 2018 to a lukewarm response. Now, with Christina Hendricks, John Slattery, and a reported $50 million budget across eight episodes, the series is being reconsidered as a darker, more
Amazon didn’t just bankroll Matthew Weiner’s next swing at prestige television—its movie-and-television push helped clear the way for a project that felt bigger than the usual pitch-room logic.
Weiner came out of a writing career that included the Sopranos. then helped create the juggernaut era-defining run of Mad Men. The New York-based AMC drama about advertising executives in the 1960s carried major awards and. after its conclusion in 2015. left many audiences wondering what a “carte blanche” follow-up could possibly look like.
Three years later. Prime Video rolled out The Romanoffs. a lavish period drama with a star-studded cast and a reported $50 million budget spread across eight episodes. It arrived in 2018 to a reception that left both viewers and critics underwhelmed—and yet it’s now being pulled back into conversation in a streaming landscape where royal-family dramas like The Crown keep climbing year after year.
The question isn’t whether The Romanoffs tried to do something ambitious. It’s whether its own ambition ever found a steady foothold with audiences.
Across its lone season. The Romanoffs tells separate stories about people who believe they are descendants of Russia’s titular royal family—tracing their line back to Nicholas II. the nation’s last monarch before the Russian Revolution in 1917. The series doesn’t chase one continuous plot. Each of the eight episodes plays as a standalone narrative, roughly the length of a short feature film.
Still. the connecting tissue is unmistakable: a shared sense of pride and royalty that persists across families living in the present day. In one episode, that pride shows up through hotel owners. In another, it surfaces among suburban middle-class workers dealing with pent-up rage and alienation. There are Mexican gossip columnists who uncover a malpractice scandal. and there’s also a more meta turn—an actor starring in a miniseries about the Romanov family.
The cast is one of the show’s loudest selling points, built from recognizable character actors and marquee names. It includes Christina Hendricks and John Slattery. plus Aaron Eckhart. Corey Stoll. Isabelle Huppert. Amanda Peet. Diane Lane. Kathryn Hahn. and Noah Wyle—who. notably. is not playing a medical professional. The Romanoffs stacks talent across an anthology format that asks viewers to keep believing in the same central delusion. even as the settings and characters shift.
The series’ scale is also part of why it keeps resurfacing. The sheer ambition and scope of Mad Men is one benchmark, but The Romanoffs goes bigger in a different way. Weiner’s run on the series is described as a stretch of freedom enabled by Amazon’s foray into the movie and television industry—an era when the company’s commercial power offered budgets intended to fulfill creative visions that studios might have labeled uncommercial.
And when it comes to spending, The Romanoffs doesn’t hide it. The anthology’s $50 million budget is described as having been stretched to its maximum. with sets and costumes bursting with rich texture. Locations aren’t just backdrops either: the series moves through settings including New York City, Mexico City, and Austria.
Even the show’s critics-for-a-reason legacy is tied to how it behaves with that ambition. Some reviews at the time used “self-indulgence” to describe it. and the series’ heavy-handed confrontation of privilege. heritage. and insatiable human desires gave plenty of viewers something to push back against. After a few episodes. the anthology structure can also start to feel like a problem instead of a promise. with the viewer left wishing the show were simply focused on honing in on one storyline.
Weiner tries to interconnect the episodes, but the series doesn’t fully land a grand thesis, leaving certain themes to feel broader than they are cohesive. The result is a show that can seem to juggle too much—at odds with the kind of precision that made Mad Men feel inevitable.
Yet if there’s one reason The Romanoffs refuses to disappear completely, it’s craft. Even with reservations about its pacing and structure. the production is repeatedly described as exquisitely crafted. placing its big-budget visual approach in a league of its own. And across those gilded settings. the series carries what feels like a persistent ache: characters clinging to their “flimsy royal lineage” for validation. trapped in something that resembles a gilded cage.
The longing and frustration run through the anthology’s lighthearted moments and its sobering ones. The show frames those feelings as an operatic response to lives lived on the wrong side of fantasy—characters who wish to belong inside a great Russian novel. only to be dragged into the mundane. unceremonious perils of everyday life.
There’s also a certain symmetry people can’t ignore when they look back: The Romanoffs doesn’t just follow Mad Men—it’s positioned as a companion piece. Mad Men’s empty-void commentary is described as played for operatic effect here too. but with a different set of windows. Where Mad Men’s characters chase meaning through work and performance. The Romanoffs swaps that language of ambition for the language of inheritance.
For viewers returning to it now, the series’ status matters, too. As of 2026, it remains Weiner’s last screenwriting credit on record, giving The Romanoffs a kind of end-cap energy for fans tracking his career.
The Romanoffs may have been a misfire for many when it aired in 2018. but its combination of $50 million scale. an eight-episode anthology built around Nicholas II-era delusion. and a cast that could fill a blockbuster screen keeps it from fading quietly. In an age when audiences keep rewarding royal drama—The Crown and beyond—this darker. gilded reimagining keeps waiting in the wings. ready for a second look.
The Romanoffs Prime Video Matthew Weiner Christina Hendricks John Slattery Nicholas II The Crown anthology series Mad Men Aaron Eckhart Isabelle Huppert Kathryn Hahn