“Bright and High Circle,” the fifth episode of Matthew Weiner’s Amazon series, The Romanoffs, takes its title from a line in a poem by Alexander Pushkin, one that the character Katherine (Diane Lane) teaches in her Russian-literature class:
When your so young and fairy years
Are smeared by the gossip’s noise,
And by the high word’s trial, fierce,
Your public honor’s fully lost;
Alone midst indifferent crowds,
I share with you your soul’s pains
The poem expresses solidarity with someone whose reputation is being slandered; Pushkin (a notorious womanizer, for what it’s worth) seems to rage against “cruel” accusations and “hypocritical damnation,” and advises the subject to rise above them. This sets the theme of “Bright and High Circle,” which is about vague and gossipy accusations leveled at a piano teacher, David Patton (Andrew Rannells), in a wealthy community in Los Angeles.
“Bright and High Circle,” for all its dull plotting and impossibly ponderous pacing, is hard to interpret as anything other than Weiner’s response to #MeToo, a movement sparked by accusations of misconduct against men in the entertainment industry, including Weiner himself. It’s notably the first piece of art to emerge from someone implicated by #MeToo that directly addresses the movement, and so it presents an intriguing opportunity. There’s room within fiction for nuance—for wrestling with the dynamics of power and performance that make the entertainment industry’s problems with harassment so tangled. And yet this episode of television isn’t much more than a 70-minute extended cut of the words witch hunt. (That specific metaphor even features in the episode, in case the message wasn’t clear enough already.)