“Panorama,” the peculiar new episode of The Romanoffs, seems straightforward enough. A muckraking Mexican reporter named Abel (Juan Pablo Castañeda) is investigating a ritzy medical clinic in which grievously ill, extravagantly wealthy, generally contemptible patients are being sold snake oil by a shifty doctor. During the course of his investigation, he unexpectedly falls in love with Victoria (Radha Mitchell), the concerned mother of a 12-year-old kid who inherited hemophilia along with her Romanoff genes. Both the exposé and the love affair end up unconsummated.
But then, as Adam Curtis might say, a strange thing happened. As a street performer sings a cloying tune to the general effect of “you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life,” Abel ends the episode by walking through a magical-realist live-action recreation of artist Diego Rivera’s massive mural The History of Mexico, flanked by Rivera, Frida Kahlo, her sister (and Rivera’s lover) Cristina, Marx, and Lenin as they stroll off into the proverbial sunset.
It’s audacious, I’ll give ’em that!
I’m not gonna sneer at the audacity, either. Directed, like every episode, by Weiner from a script he co-wrote with Dan LeFranc, “Panorama” aims for the effect referred to in the title: a sweeping portrait of haves and have-nots, rich and poor, white and brown, predator and prey, with Abel and Victoria’s short, sweet, sad relationship at the center — the same position Rivera occupies in his massive mural, as Abel points out to Nicky earlier in the episode. Driving this point home with a rupture in the fabric of reality that feels nothing like what’s come before isn’t the kind of move you see from highly lauded, allegedly surreal shows like Legion or Maniac, shows so larded with explanations for their inexplicable events that the dreamlike life is often crushed right out of them. Whatever else it is, the ending of “Panorama” is weird in a way that even shows that aim for surreal weirdness rarely manage.
But lots of things can be weird without being, y’know, good. And things can be weird without being earned, too.
I reviewed the weird Mexico episode of The Romanoffs for Vulture.
Tags: reviews, the romanoffs, TV, TV reviews, vulture