In the new limited series from TV impresario Ryan Murphy and regular collaborator Ian Brennan (the duo behind Glee and Scream Queens), post-war Hollywood is reimagined as a burgeoning hub of contemporary progressive thought, where there's room at the top for plucky youngsters of varying colours and sexual orientations — so long as they're uniformly attractive and well-kempt.
"I'm gonna change the way they make movies in this town," promises aspiring director Raymond Ainsley, who's played by Darren Criss, an alum of both Glee and The Assassination of Gianni Versace — for the record, a much sharper Murphy production than this one.
"I wanna take the story of Hollywood and give it a rewrite," replies Archie Coleman, the budding screenwriter played by newcomer Jeremy Pope. (Might I suggest he start by rewriting this artless dialogue.)
Their revolution is a-brewing at the fictional Ace studios, where Archie has managed to sell a script without revealing that he's both black and gay, with Raymond (half-Filipino, but able to pass as white) on board to direct — and gunning to cast his African-American girlfriend Camille (Laura Harrier), one of the studio's contract players, as the lead.
All wildly controversial stuff for 40s Hollywood, which was still subject to the conservative strictures of the Hays Code.
But the fierce pushback anticipated by Archie, Raymond, and Camille never quite manifests — because Murphy's Hollywood is little more than a vapid exercise in woke wish fulfillment — in which bigotry proves a startlingly easy condition to treat.
I don't begrudge anyone their happy ending, but certainly the series would have benefitted from a more meaningful engagement with the wrongs it sets out to right — or hell, just a little bit more conflict!
Meanwhile, loitering outside the studio gates, hoping to get noticed by anyone in casting, is recently returned veteran Jack Castello (The Politician's David Corenswet). As a straight white guy, what hampers his path to silver screen glory is not his race or sexuality but a pronounced lack of talent.
That's not much of an issue, however, once he starts turning tricks for upscale clients out of a gas station that doubles as a brothel (just pull up to the pump and ask to go to 'dreamland'). Soon after Jack services Avis (Patti Lupone), the brassy wife of Ace's studio head, he too is fraternising with the chosen folks on the other side of the gate.
Real-life denizens of Hollywood's golden era also make regular appearances, revivified in order to lend poignance to this confected history — amongst them closeted matinee idol Rock Hudson (portrayed, with all the charm and intellect of a potato, by Jake Picking) and his provocatively blunt agent Henry Willson (Jim Parsons, of The Big Bang Theory), as well as Anna May Wong (Michelle Krusiec), the first Chinese-American movie star.
The results ought to make them squirm in their graves. What was clearly meant to be uplifting, empowering viewing — a risqué revisionist fantasy with a social conscience, why not? — is thoroughly deadened by the sanctimonious tone that often clings to Murphy's slick and soapy melodramas.
"Sometimes I think folks in this town don't really understand the power they have," says Raymond, always in earnest, to Ace's Head of Production (Joe Mantello) during a pitch meeting.
Au contraire, Raymond: none of Hollywood's players seem to ever have doubted the industry's power — so ardent is their love affair with show biz, so convinced of its importance, that they can conceive of no nobler or more pressing cause than equal opportunity stardom.
"Movies don't just show us how the world is," continues the idealistic director. "They show us how the world can be — and if we change the way that movies are made, […] I think you can change the world."
(Together with Brennan and Janet Mock, his co-writers, Murphy seems to be terribly afraid of subtext, consistently opting to break the golden rule of storytelling — 'show don't tell'.)
Variations on this theme are voiced again and again throughout the series. Even Eleanor Roosevelt (Harriet Sansom Harris) joins the chorus: "I used to believe that good government could change the world," she tells the rapt studio execs during a surprise visit. "I'm not sure I believe that anymore. But what you do" — sing along if you know the words — "can change the world."
While Murphy might have set out to foreground the importance of diversity both in front of and behind the camera — critical to the vitality and social relevance of the industry's output — the series he's served up seems more invested in the importance of Hollywood itself.
Even the industry's tawdry side gets buffed to a peculiar sheen here. That all of the many sexual encounters depicted in the show are in some way transactional, whether or not cash is exchanged afterwards, is something most often played for light-hearted laughs, without so much as a whiff of critique or — heaven forbid — moral ambiguity.
It's telling that foreplay between Raymond and Camille, as well as Jack and his generous clients, only ever takes the form of shoptalk: in Murphy's Hollywood, there's just nothing more romantic than 'making it'.
True, Tinseltown is home to a long and rich masturbatory tradition (see: the Oscars), but I can't help but find this doggedly starry-eyed take a bit rich coming from a Netflix program — especially one financed by what's said to have been the biggest producing deal in television history.
There's some irony in the fact that the rise of television was one of the primary factors in the sharp decline of studio-era Hollywood that began in 1948, less than a year after Murphy's gee-whiz kids catch their lucky breaks.
Hollywood is on Netflix from May 1.
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2020-04-30 20:55:17Z
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