In other words, The Romanoffs is another show that might test your tolerance for the pain of rich white people. It also tends to smack of self-indulgence. Weiner was given an exorbitant budget for the show (around $70 million), creative freedom, and apparently unlimited access to a squadron of stars (Isabelle Huppert, Aaron Eckhart, Kathryn Hahn, Christina Hendricks, Amanda Peet, Ron Livingston … the list goes on and on). It isn’t just the cast that makes The Romanoffs feel like a series of Woody Allen films—it’s also the way each installment seems like an opportunity for Weiner to try out different locales and genres (Kubrickian horror here, Parisian high society there).

And yet, when it works, the series can be fascinating. Which other TV writer would name an episode after a line about mortality from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land? Or insert a surreal, unprompted musical interlude when you’re expecting it least?

In the first episode, “The Violet Hour,” which debuts Friday, the Romanov legacy of entitlement manifests in Anushka (Marthe Keller), an aging French doyenne in a magnificent Paris apartment who tortures the nephew (Aaron Eckhart) who’s transparently waiting for her to die so he can inherit the property. Anushka is awful beyond even comic possibility: deliberately cruel and virulently racist. “Your womb is full of cobwebs,” she tells Sophie (Louise Bourgoin), the grasping French girlfriend of Eckhart’s Greg. After Anushka fires the latest in a Busby Berkeley line of caregivers, an agency sends her Hajar (Inès Melab), a lovely young nursing student in a head scarf who absorbs invective so ghastly that the scenes are hard to justify. “Take your bombs and go home,” Anushka says while slamming the door in Hajar’s face. Later, on the street, Anushka compares the “lineage” of white families with Muslims, who she says breed like “two dogs meeting in the street.”

It’s really a herculean struggle to feel sympathy for Anushka, in all her gorgonian horror, and yet the episode hinges on doing exactly that. You’re supposed to be charmed by her eventual attachment to Hajar, and to feel pity for the death of her only son many years ago, and to be mesmerized by the grandeur of her appartement, which was purchased by Russian exiles and pillaged by the Nazis. You’re supposed to be captivated, like Greg, by the superficial allure of Paris, even when its underbelly of ugly, systemic prejudice is exposed. It’s made clear that Anushka is afraid: terrified that her family line will die out, that the Romanovs will have survived everything only for the dynasty to end with her.

If the meek will inherit the earth, The Romanoffs posits, then pity those born with high opinions of themselves, for they will be condemned to perpetual disappointment. The second episode, “The Royal We” (which also debuted Friday, with installments coming weekly after that), stars Corey Stoll as a distant Romanoff (he spells it with two fs, in a nod to the show’s title, which seems itself to imply phoniness and pretension), Michael. Michael works for a college-prep company in a generic American suburb and is married to Shelly (Kerry Bishé), a woman apparently intended to embody vacuity, since she watches rom-coms and wears T-shirts that say You Had Me at Merlot.