Netflix And Amazon: Enough Already!

They still call it streaming, but today it’s a raging flood – and quality control is being swept away

- Stuart Mcgurk

There’s a point in The Romanoffs, the recent Amazon Prime Video series from Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men, when you will say to yourself, “What exactly is... The point... Of this?” It won’t come straight away. After all, this is the great Matthew Weiner we’re talking about.

You’ll watch and at first you’ll give it the benefit of the doubt. Why would you not? And so what if the set-up is so simple as to be meaningless? Each episode is an independent story, with no connection to the rest, save for the fact that in each set-up people believe they have descended from Russian royalty.

But hold your horses if you think that is remotely important, because it isn’t: The Romanoffs is essentially a cluster of standalone films, each around 90 minutes in length, that needed to have some kind of title in order for Amazon to claim it’s a TV series. In truth, it is actually a blank cheque for Weiner to make eight films about whatever he wanted.