It must almost be summertime, because all of my TV shows are wrapping up their seasons. First there was Sugar, and now it is A Gentleman in Moscow. This period drama, based upon the novel by Amor Towles, follows Ewan McGregor as Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov (Ewan McGregor)—Sasha to his friends, or “Your Excellency” to the dwindling minority of Russians who still recognize honorifics, is an aristocrat caught up in the Russian turmoil of the first half of the 20th-century. Beginning after the Bolshevik Revolution and running through to Khrushchev and the Cold War, this is a story told through a series of vignettes, that punctuate the history of that time. He is spared a bullet, when a tribunal attributes a famous revolutionary poem to him. He is instead sentenced to a lifetime of house arrest in the downtown Moscow Metropol Hotel.

Even a gilded cage is still a cage and getting kicked upstairs from his luxury suite to the drafty servant’s quarters above, only hastens the dissipation of the novelty of his situation. This leaves Rostov to entertain himself as best he can, as he counts the days of his imprisonment. This story is fiction, but the Metropol Hotel is real and still stands across the street from the Kremlin. Played with boundless optimism by McGregor, over the years, Rostov gradually adopts the family that he never knew from the hotel’s staff and guests. Occasionally the historical events occurring outside the hotel intrude, but they must usually take a backseat to the personal stories that populate Rostov’s world within the hotel.