Online series centers on Russian family

Russia, a daily fixture in the nation’s headlines these days, will figure prominently in Matthew Weiner’s upcoming series for Amazon Prime.

“The Romanoffs,” an eight-episode anthology series, Weiner said, will center on people who think they’re descendants of the titular former ruling family of Russia.

The family, killed by Bolshevik revolutionaries in 1918, has been a popular subject of mystery lore, much of it positing that a daughter, Anastasia, escaped death and assumed a new identity. (The more common contemporary Anglicized spelling of the last name is “Romanov.”)

The series will be Weiner’s first since the end, in 2015, of his acclaimed drama “Mad Men.”

“We’re at a place in our history where people are looking for a close connection to their roots,” Weiner said. “There’s great debate about who is a Romanoff and what happened to the Romanoffs.

“The story for me is that we’re all questioning who we are and who we say we are.”

Writing has begun on the series, which will cost about $50 million to produce. Each episode will feature self-contained stories — structurally closer to shows such as “The Twilight Zone” or “Black Mirror” than contemporary anthology series that track a single narrative over the course of a season.

Weiner will direct four of the eight episodes and “be writing as many as possible and overseeing the writers room,” he said. He has brought in several former “Mad Men” writers and producers and hopes to feature actors from that cast in “The Romanoffs.”

“I’m basically trying to get every person who was involved with that show.”

“The Romanoffs,” he said, will probably debut next year.