The eight-episode drama A Gentleman in Moscow, a limited-series adaptation of Amor Towles’s best-selling 2016 novel of the same name, is set in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution as tribunals and apparatchiks herald a grim new Soviet order. Outside the front doors of the Metropol, early-20th-century Russia convulses, but the grand hotel endures—its residents, guests, and servants comprising a society unto itself. Among the cast of characters is Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s movie starlet, who makes her dramatic entrance in the show’s second episode. We first see her from the back as she struts down the stairs that lead into the hotel’s dining room. The instantly smitten Russian count Alexander Rostov (played by Winstead’s real-life husband, Ewan McGregor) rises from his table. They banter about her dogs, and she’s flirtatious in a way that feels like a performance within a performance. Everything from her disarming smile to the way she abruptly departs for some other corner of the Metropol leaves the poor count wanting more. —Andy Meek

A Gentleman in Moscow is also available for streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime Video