What’s on TV Friday: ‘The Romanoffs’ and ‘The Kindergarten Teacher’

Matthew Weiner’s new series debuts on Amazon. And Maggie Gyllenhaal stars in “The Kindergarten Teacher” on Netflix.

What’s Streaming

THE ROMANOFFS on Amazon. Matthew Weiner had writer’s block. After a seven-season run of “Mad Men,” the show he’d created, Weiner took a break and then tried to restart his creative brain. “It was really bad,” he told The New York Times in a recent interview. “Nothing was happening.” Then he wrote his debut novel, “Heather, the Totality,” published in 2017, and discovered the pleasure of telling a story that didn’t have to continue episode to episode. Another result of that realization comes in the form of “The Romanoffs,” an anthology series for Amazon with an all-star cast: Diane Lane, Kathryn Hahn, John Slattery, Aaron Eckhart and Isabelle Huppert are among the faces appearing across its eight episodes. In each, there are characters who think they descend from the titular Russian royal family. That bizarre connective tissue binds these stories, which are set around the world. The series begins with a pair of episodes, each nearly 90 minutes.

THE KINDERGARTEN TEACHER (2018) on Netflix. “I think we have a young Mozart.” That line, delivered by a kindergarten teacher (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal), would typically be welcome praise from an instructor. But there’s a dark edge to it in this thriller. Directed by Sara Colangelo (“Little Accidents”), the movie is a remake of an Israeli film about a teacher who develops an obsession with a young student (played here by Parker Sevak). In her review for The Times, Jeannette Catsoulis called it a “riveting remake,” writing that Colangelo suffuses “each scene with an insinuating, prickly tension” and “remains ruthlessly committed to her screw-tightening tone, offering the viewer no comforting moral escape hatch.”

THE CURIOUS CREATIONS OF CHRISTINE McCONNELL on Netflix. Audiences resentful that streaming services lack goth baking shows are in luck this week. Ms. McConnell, the author of “Deceptive Desserts: A Lady’s Guide to Baking Bad!,” plays a fictional version of herself in this cooking show, which also has spooky puppets.

SHAKESPEARE UNCOVERED 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice” has long provoked debate over its anti-Semitism, a theme so easily extracted that the play was used as propaganda in Nazi Germany. In this episode of PBS’s Shakespeare history series, the actor F. Murray Abraham discusses and investigates the controversies surrounding the play.