The Romanoffs currently has a 43% rating among “top critics” on Rotten Tomatoes. The Walking Dead, the zombie juggernaut no one seems to like anymore, more than doubles that score with 88%. Arrow, one of several interconnected shows about DC superheroes, is sitting even prettier at 91%. Even the largely maligned but seemingly immortal CBS nerd-culture comedy The Big Bang Theory rates a 75% among people whose job it is to tell you whether a TV show is any good. Outside of network publicists and Rotten Tomatoes itself, I don’t think anyone would argue that review aggregators actually tell you much about the quality of a given show. But looking at those numbers, I think they say an awful lot about the qualities of shows that critics find valuable, and it’s not anything good.

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By my tally, The Romanoffs was half good-to-great, and half okay-to-meh. In that light, perhaps a score hovering in the 40-50% range makes sense. But in a world where Arrow is nine percentage points shy of perfection? It’s pure-dee nonsense for a show this ambitious, involving this much acting talent, to get a failing grade. Even among critics, series that take no risks because they have no ambition are rewarded above those that do. You don’t even have to like The Romanoffs, let alone Matthew Weiner, to recognize that. And a TV landscape without room for wild, swing-for-the-fences use of unprecedented financial backing and creative clout, even if they strike out half the time—a world where reassurance, fanservice, and algorithmic crowd-pleasing hold sway—is a bleak one indeed.

I reviewed the season finale of The Romanoffs, and got some stuff off my chest about the state of TV criticism, for Vulture.

“End of the Line” is the best episode of The Romanoffs since its third, the psychological horror movie in anthology-TV-show form “House of Special Purpose.” It’s arguably the best, period. Either way, it has more in common with that Christina Hendricks–starring installment than quality: They share an atmosphere of dislocation and paranoia that goes beyond the mere fact that they’re both about Americans abroad. (So were two or three of this season’s other episodes, after all.) There’s something about them that feels … I dunno, sick. Sick, and being lied to by the doctors telling you you’re going to be fine, and by the loved ones promising to stay by your side to the end.

Written by director Matthew Weiner’s longtime collaborators Maria and Andre Jacquemetton, “End of the Line” succeeds in its grim task in part by casting two of the most likable actors on the series so far. Kathryn Hahn and Jay R. Ferguson, ebullient comedic talents who count Bad Moms and Mad Men among their diverse credits, play Anka and Joe Garner, an American couple who travel to the Russian port city of Vladivostok to adopt a baby after years of failed attempts to have one themselves. They find Russia to be a cold, bleak place: Government officials are openly corrupt and actively homophobic, the water is dirty, the health-care system is shoddy, and heavily armed military police are omnipresent. Thank goodness they’re there to whisk some poor child away to America where she’ll never have to worry about any of that stuff again, right?

I reviewed the fine seventh episode of The Romanoffs for Vulture.

“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.

“What, you think she’d ruin his life because of a joke?”

“A good person doesn’t ruin somebody’s life over some random accusation.”

“Bearing false witness is the worst crime that you can commit. Otherwise, anyone can say anything about anybody, and just saying it ruins their life no matter what they did. Does that seem fair?”

Provided you didn’t toss your laptop across the room or yank your Amazon Fire stick out of the TV in disgust the moment you heard lines like those, episode five of The Romanoffs (“Bright and High Circle”) is worth talking about.

I reviewed the false-accusation episode of Matthew Weiner’s The Romanoffs, which was bad in more story-specific and complicated ways than you might have heard, for Vulture.

If I had to select a “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” knockoff declarative lede for a glossy magazine-style profile of Julia Wells, the wealthily careworn protagonist of The Romanoffs’ latest episode, “Expectation,” it might be this: Julia Wells can’t settle down.

Played by Amanda Peet — who seems to somehow become fuller and realer in the role as time passes — Julia spends most of the hour, during which she is almost continuously on-screen, moving from one place to another, and always with another, further destination in mind. She takes a couple of subway rides, catches a couple of cabs, mills around in a couple of famous New York retail establishments, gets dressed for two separate meals out at two different restaurants. Her big errand for the day involves picking people up at the airport and dropping them off at their hotel. Her workout of choice is moving in place on the elliptical machine, and her post-workout visit to the gym locker room just entails her walking through it, navigating other women’s bodies. Even her job entails helping the homeless and the transient. And if she pauses for more than a minute, her mind does the wandering for her, flashing back to events from decades ago, years ago, hours ago, minutes ago; she daydreams about resolution and absolution that are not forthcoming. Wherever she goes, there she isn’t.

I reviewed the Amanda Peet episode of The Romanoffs for Vulture.

Horror is a genre in conversation with itself — more so, perhaps, than any other genre, because the topic of conversation is always ultimately the same. Horror filmmakers study the things that frighten them, then reimagine, refine, and revise them, the better to unleash their own specific fears upon new audiences. This is as true of capital “G,” capital “F” Great Films like Under the Skin and Hereditary as it is of derivative corn like Stranger Things, or of recent critical darling Mandy, which after the weed-scented glacial pacing and lush psychedelia of its first half has nary an original idea in its head and is basically just Stranger Things for heshers. The stuff that’s truly worthwhile does more than merely remix the past, because the people making it filter those fears through their own unique ideas about the present.

Among many other things, “The House of Special Purpose” is a horror film, and it is not Matthew Weiner’s first. As the creator and showrunner of Mad Men he presided over several eerie and gut-wrenching hours of television, primarily during the show’s death-haunted fifth season. The fever-dream murder (guest-starring Twin Peaks’s Mädchen Amick) and the real-life terror of mass murderer Richard Speck in “Mystery Date,” the car-crash scare tactics and the shadow of tower sniper Charles Whitman in “Signal 30,” the acid-trip creepiness and artificially lit missing-person freakout of “Far Away Places” — all this is before the season’s climactic death, which I prefer not to name-drop publicly if I can help it but to which the character’s fellow cast members reacted, by all accounts, with genuine horror. (Of course, let’s not forget the lawnmower scene, either.)

But the anthology nature of The Romanoffs enables Weiner to go deeper into the genre than ever before. A self-contained story, with no previously screened backstory for the characters and no need to write for their continued existence either, abrogates the need for Weiner to do anything but creep people out in his own idiosyncratic way. Working with writer Mary Sweeney, he does exactly that.

Playing long-overdue link catchup: I reviewed the Christina Hendricks episode of The Romanoffs for Vulture.

Two episodes in is too early to hazard a guess as to what ties Matthew Weiner’s anthology series The Romanoffs together. But there’s no reward without risk, right? So here goes. Based on “The Violet Hour” and its followup, “The Royal We,” The Romanoffs might be so titled not just because its lead characters share ancestry with slain Russian royalty, but because they have nothing else to share. Both episodes feature antagonistic protagonists as hollow as Anastasia La Charnay’s Fabergé egg; the drama, and in this episode’s case in particular the comedy, arises from what they choose to fill that egg with.

I reviewed the second episode of The Romanoffs, aka the one with Corey Stolle and the god Kerry Bishé, for Vulture.

If you want to return to the world of Matthew Weiner, you’d best prepare for a rough reentry. We’re not just talking about the opening titles to The Romanoffs here, which replace Mad Men’s falling silhouette in a suit with the trickling blood of the massacred royal family of Russia as its connecting thread. Mere minutes after the last notes of Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers’ “Refugee” close out the credits, we’re subjected to an almost unbearable torrent of racist invective — in subtitled French, no less — from an aging descendant of aristocracy to her grin-and-bear-it Muslim caregiver.

The younger woman, Hajar (Inès Melab), has to stand there and take it as the older woman, Anastasia La Charnay (Marthe Keller) — Anushka to her friends, and there are precious few of those — rolls out her bigoted litany. Anushka accuses Hajar of terrorism, suspects her of assassination by poison, recites half a dozen historical military victories of Christendom over Islam, brags that the traditional French croissant is the West’s way of literally eating the crescent that symbolizes her faith, and tells her, as she admires the La Charnay family’s heirloom Fabergé egg, that she “will never, ever have that.”

To Anushka, the egg means literally everything: wealth, respectability, Paris, France, Frenchness, humanity. All of it, held perpetually out of reach of people like Hajar by sad old white folks clinging to triumphs (whole Arches of them, in fact) they themselves did nothing to earn except through accident of birth. Behind Hajar’s placid grin you can all but hear her thoughts in response: “Look, lady, I just work here.”

For all its initial, confrontational unpleasantness, “The Violet Hour,” the first self-contained installment in Weiner’s ambitious anthology series for Amazon, soon settles into a familiar story pattern. Too familiar, perhaps: From my notes, I see I first predicted where the story was going at the 18:05 mark, approximately 32 and a half minutes before the inevitable big reveal. Nevertheless, some stories are worth retelling, whether because they force us to confront unpleasant truths or comfort us with resolutions that, in the real world, are much harder to come by. This episode is a little from Column A, a little from Column B.

I’m covering Matthew Weiner’s new series The Romanoffs for Vulture, beginning with my review of the series premiere. Join me, won’t you?