Having enjoyed Towles' novel, I was looking forward to this series and was happy that Ewan McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead were to feature in the cast. Episode One began things well, with McGregor capturing Rostov's charm, elegance and optimism nicely. EpisodeTwo has introduced. Winstead as a suitablly feline Anna Urbanova. But this is where things got ... weird.
It was already clear that the production was indulging in the current fad for multi-racial casting in period productions. While the - for Moscow circa 1918 - remarkably diverse cast was found mainly in the staff of the Hotel Metropol, this was a bit odd, but not too distracting. It would be highly unlikely that a hotel in Moscow in this period would have so many non-white staff, but it wasn't so much of a stretch as to take the viewer out of the production.
But when.the second episode introduced Rostov's old schoolfriend Mikhail "Mishka" Mindich played by. Fehinti Balogun, disbelief became increasingly hard to suspend. Why did a Russian aristrocrat go to school with a black man? No explanation was given. There was a line about Rostov's family "taking (him) in" and clothing him, but no backstory as to how they would know each other at all. Similarly, the Soviet. Minister of Culture Minister of Culture Nachevko is played by Jason Forbes. How many Soviet ministers in this or any period were black? None. So why this casting?
Some online publicity about the adaptation made a comment about the casting "looking more like our world than Revolutionary Russia" as though this was good thing. Which raises the question ... why? Surely the whole point of setting a story in Revolutionary Russia is make things look like THAT world, and not ours. Otherwise, why bother at all? Having Rostov pull out an iPhone or seeing Anna Urbanova pull up in a Tesla would also make it look "more like our world" and so would be absurd. So why not that, but this weird casting?
I'll going to persevere with the series despite this. But I really hope this bizarre and pointless anchronistic casting in historical productions is a trend that will pass very soon. Diverse casting is great ... when it makes sense. Here, as in too many period productions lately, it simply does not. And it adds absolutely nothing.