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Ewan McGregor proves exceedingly appealing as 'A Gentleman in Moscow'

This is FRESH AIR. In the new TV series "A Gentleman In Moscow," Ewan McGregor plays a Russian count who's put under house arrest after the Russian Revolution. Based on the 2016 novel by Amor Towles, the show begins streaming on Paramount+ today and then is televised Sundays on Showtime. Our critic-at-large, John Powers, says that it's a light series about dark things.

JOHN POWERS, BYLINE: Nearly 250 years after we kicked out the British monarchy, Americans can't get enough of the aristocracy. We devour "The Crown" and "Downton Abbey," obsess over Kate Middleton's health and Prince Harry's marriage and find vampires extra sexy because they're nobly born. This fascination helped make a bestseller of "A Gentleman In Moscow," Amor Towles' sleekly tooled novel about an exceedingly appealing Russian aristocrat after the 1917 Russian Revolution. A romanticized fable about a grimly realistic era, it's been adapted into a TV series starring the exceedingly appealing Scottish actor Ewan McGregor.

The show was created by Ben Vanstone, who was behind the reboot of "All Creatures Great And Small." He uses this brutal period as a backdrop for an easy to swallow tale about a decent but frivolous man who's deepened by being cut off from his life of privilege. MacGregor plays Count Alexander Rostov, a literate, beautifully mannered bachelor with a connoisseur's knowledge of wine, a dandy's immaculately cut suits and a moustache about which he's quite vain.

His story begins in 1922, when the Bolsheviks sentence him - implausibly, it must be said - to lifelong house arrest in Moscow's luxurious Hotel Metropol. Although he lives under the baleful gaze of a secret policeman named Osip, played by Johnny Harris, this isn't exactly the gulag. Despite his small quarters, he eats nightly in the hotel's elegant restaurant, whose cellar stocks his adored Chateauneuf-du-Pape. Over the next three decades, the count befriends a young girl, Nina, who grows into an avid communist and reunites with his radical college friend Mishka played with Dostoevskian fervor by Fehinti Balogun. He also gets involved with a wise up actress Anna Urbanova. That's a nifty Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who boots him out of her bed with the same imperious haste with which she invited him in.

As the passing years unleash famine, propagandistic lies and Stalinist terror, most of it invisible inside the hotel, he finds himself doing things he could never have imagined. He becomes a waiter in the hotel restaurant and starts looking after a little girl, Sofia, whose parents have been shipped off to a camp. Here, talking to the Stalin-admiring Nina, he offers a parable about the moths in Manchester, England.