By After winning a cabinet full of awards for his slow-burning drama about the New York advertising scene, Mad Men, Matthew Weiner has been mostly MIA since the series finished in 2015.
That was until yesterday when the trailer dropped for his latest project, an eight part Amazon Prime television series titled The Romanoffs. Each episode features a different story and group of people who believe they are descended from the infamous Romanov Russian family.
The Romanovs were a dynasty who ruled Russia for centuries until the revolution lead to the dismantling of the Tsarist autocracy, and their execution by the Bolsheviks in 1918. The series is based on the longstanding myth that one of the children, Anastasia, survived and her descendants carried on the family name around the world.
Here's why we think this will be the series everyone is unpacking at the water-cooler this October.
The cast and crew is incredibly impressive
Weiner has reunited Christina Hendricks and John Slattery, two of the stand out performers from Mad Men. According to Deadline, as many as 14 of the show's alumni, from executive producers to writers to costume designers, are involved.
The rest of the highly impressive cast includes Isabelle Huppert, Diane Lane, Amanda Peet, Jack Huston, Andrew Rannells, Mike Doyle, JJ Feild, Kathryn Hahn, Ben Miles, Ron Livingston Radha Mitchell and Hugh Skinner to name a few.
But this isn't a Mad Men repeat
According to the sneak peak so far, The Romanoffs appears to be a lighter series than the often reflective and sombre tone which Mad Men struck. In the trailer we see the different characters and storylines stake their claim to the famed family line with soundbites such as "I could be a Romanoff?", "He's a Romanoff too?" and "Checking in for Romanoff?"
The repetitive claims to the family name suggest wires are going to get crossed in a very farcical way. "I'm half-Russian, half-German, half-French," muses Aaron Eckhart in one scene, to which he is then asked, "You're three halves?"
It's a prescient look at fame and global connections
Despite focusing on a family which spans back to the 1900s, the show highlights how longstanding the human impulse toward notoriety and 'being connected' really are.
"The reason that I picked the Romanovs is that in an era where we have social media and so much theoretical connection to each other it really seems like we're further apart than ever," Weiner told The Hollywood Reporter last year.
“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,” Weiner said in a separate interview with Variety. “There’s great debate about who is a Romanov and what happened to the Romanovs. The story for me is that we’re all questioning who we are and who we say we are.”
Episodes will be released weekly
Bucking the trend of the all-episode drop which we've all become so accustomed to on Netflix, The Romanoffs will release a story a week on Amazon Prime from 12 October.
This means goodbye spoilers, goodbye smug Tweets about having already finished it in a day and and back to the drip-fed suspense and collective experience of dissecting a show week by week. We can't wait.
