The 'A Gentleman in Moscow' Trailer is Introduces a Timely Tale

The collapse of the Russian aristocracy towards the end of World War I was perhaps inevitable, considering Russia's shattering losses during the war and the reactionary policies of the extremely weak Tsar Nicholas II. However, the original revolution, which happened in February 1917, gave way to the Bolshevik Revolution months later in October, followed by the Russian Civil War, all of which were ugly in ways that history has tried to forget both up to the creation of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1922 and onward once Stalin took power in 1924.

A Gentleman in Moscow will be covering most of that, though from a perspective you wouldn't expect, in the first adaptation of Amor Towles's internationally bestselling 2016 novel of the same name. Starring Ewan McGregor (Obi-Wan Kenobi) as the fictional Count Alexander Rostov, an aristocrat living in Paris who returns home in a fit of misplaced nationalism when the monarchy falls, only to be put on trial as a "social parasite." Spared execution, he's put under house arrest in the attic of Moscow's Hotel Metropol, where he's told leaving will be a death sentence.

The eight-episode series covers the interwar period through the end of World War II, three decades of upheaval across Moscow and Russia, seen through the hotel windows, the guests who come and go, as Rostov survives by staying indoors and keeping his ear to the walls and the ground. As his world shrinks outwardly, it grows inwardly until he becomes a man with more to give than he can hold.