Matthew Weiner's The Romanoffs and Nicolas Winding Refn's Too Old To Die Young both get axed at Amazon

A bad day for twisty prestige TV dramas from big name creators, as Amazon’s Jennifer Salke confirmed this morning that both Matthew Weiner’s The Romanoffs and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Too Old To Die Young are apparently done at the streaming TV service. This is per Deadline, which notes that Salke made it clear that, at least in Refn’s case, they were perfectly happy with the show they got from him; they just, you know, don’t really need any more languorously paced, violence-heavy explorations of the human id right now. You know how it is.

“We’re happy with the show and I’ve been texting with Nic Refn this week,” the studio head noted. (No word on whether she’s been Snapchatting with Weiner as well.) For what it’s worth, we were fascinated (and also kind of bewildered) by Refn’s marathon of a series, which saw Miles Teller play a vigilante California cop extracting all sorts of lushly-shot vengeance on the world. Weiner’s show, meanwhile—an anthology about various supposed descendants of the Russian royal family that was his first TV project since Mad Men went off the air—was more just frustrating. To quote our own Nick Wanserski, writing about the finale: “My feelings have liquefied into more of a sense of confusion about how you can have so much amazing talent, strong direction, varied and exotic locales, and even little flashes of brilliance, all in service of very mediocre television.”