Hollywood

Though optimism for its worthy cause is infused in every scene, there’s an underlying sadness to Hollywood.

A fun, frothy, limited-series period drama.

Grandiose yet often captivating Netflix drama. ... About halfway through, it will dawn on a viewer that the most provocative part of “Hollywood” is not its sauciness; it’s that the show fully intends to hand out happy endings the way Oprah used to give away cars.

While it doesn’t quite sell its point, it doesn’t fail to entertain.

It’s a wholly unique story that might not land with everyone – some viewers may find it hard to accept the show’s whimsical heightened reality along with its R-rated elements, and the show’s earnestness could be mistaken for naivety. But there can be wisdom in naivety, and I found it impossible not to smile with genuine joy every time the show’s many pieces fell so perfectly into place.

It’s an intentionally delicious and messy show, born to be binged, although a lot of the name-dropping – Tallulah Bankhead, Noel Coward -- may float right by some. No matter, its glittery blend of the tacky, corny and controversial, while lacking real weight, is an escapist balm.

"Hollywood" mostly manages to achieve a tricky balance of shifting tones. Although it occasionally meanders into melodrama and morality lessons, "Hollywood" is a mostly kicky story that imagines what would happen if old-fashioned pictures were a little more newfangled.

Hollywood is a retro fairy tale — a progressive, partly preposterous semi-lucid dream in which the underdogs actually win. It's unbelievable but sumptuous, just like all fairy tales should be.

Hollywood flops as often as it soars, but never rests in its grandiosity and ambition. The result is something escapist and frothy at a time when a retreat to a Hollywood happy ending is as alluring a fantasy as they come.

Murphy has always been better at big ideas than small details, and the sentimentality of the piece, coupled with the potency of many of the performances, after a while becomes infectious, making Hollywood’s weak spots easy to forgive. Eventually, the miniseries becomes a bit too self-congratulatory for its own good, even if its intentions are admirable.

As silly as the series’ exaggerated plotting can be—and it definitely takes a bit to tie all its odds and ends together (the components that, in Hollywood’s vernacular, would make it a “message picture”)—everything eventually coalesces during production.

Hollywood has its heart in the right place, and if you have a love for movies' Golden Age, there's a whole lot of meticulously shot nostalgia to savor. Still, rewriting history is always a thorny proposition, and producer Ryan Murphy's latest Netflix limited series doesn't earn unqualified hoorays.

Yes, it’s a mixed bag, but there’s heart in the “Hollywood can change the world, let’s try it” ethos. And there are laughs, none bigger than Jim Parsons, letting his contemptuous, foul-mouthed freak flag fly at every gorgeous “Greek god” who comes to his office for a “meeting,” a signing and a sexual transaction.

I left Hollywood feeling more entertained and uplifted than annoyed. Sometimes it's nice to see the good guys get a win, even if they haven't really earned it. (Kristen Baldwin's grade: B) Something about Hollywood’s grinning simplicity — its crushing certainty that good people make good art that earns good money and is good for society — left me cold. (Darren Franich's grade: C)

It’s a fascinating blend of fact (or least stories based on factual characters) and fiction, and the performances from the cast of rising stars and reliable veterans are dazzling — but like many a motion picture, “Hollywood” can’t overcome script problems that surface about midway through the story.

The show can’t find anything about 1947 it doesn’t shudder at and fix retroactively, fast-tracking these strides for representation that had to wait decades, in reality, to sneak in by the back door. The problem with this woke lens on the era is that it begs applause for itself. ... Still, it's legitimately touching along the way.

The early episodes of “Hollywood” are an entertaining mix of earnest inclusiveness and dishy wallow in showbiz lore. But, like those Murphy-produced TV series that went on too long, by the end, “Hollywood” is floating on so many alt-history good vibrations that it becomes less of a celebration, and more of a lecture.

“Hollywood” proves an entertaining diversion, but it carries less weight than the smog hovering over Los Angeles.

Too bad the vehicle for their improbable success, based on the story of a woman who jumped off the Hollywood sign to her death, looks like a laughable dud. The grown-ups come off better, even when you know they know they're slumming. [11 - 24 May 2020, p.7]

It’s this very sincerity, even generosity — its best features, really — that keep the series from being lifelike, and, indeed, can make it seem a little ridiculous. “Hollywood” is determined to deliver good outcomes to its characters; it’s a fixed game, and while it’s easy enough to watch, and to sympathize with its desire to liberate a repressive age, it has little urgency.

Hollywood comes as a disappointment, then, in spite of its stellar cast and admirable ambitions. It’s kind of like some of the big-screen icons that rose to fame in the early days of Hollywood: plenty of gloss, but not enough substance.

The show does sometimes achieve the righteous thrills it sets out to provide. But beyond the plot holes and absurd twists and preachy speeches that Murphy fans routinely forgive out of affection for his exuberant, propulsive, pluralistic fictions, it lionizes some questionable figures—like Ernie, who has made his living essentially duping desperate young men into sex work. And it makes enacting large-scale social change look too easy. ... Hollywood’s act of faith feels naive.

A consistently handsome, often moving, frequently sanctimonious erasure of the actual slow nature of Tinseltown progress in favor of something that's more a fairy tale than an alt-history. Much more so than Pose, a fundamentally hopeful show set against the unlikely backdrop of the AIDS epidemic, Hollywood too often comes across as simplistic and naive, though if it causes anyone to research the period depicted, there's value in that.

It’s tin-eared and confident but totally inadequate as a portrait of Hollywood as it was outside of its production design, which is admittedly rich.

Hollywood is a curiously inert, borderline dull, limited series that displays a startling lack of awareness about its formulaic narrative and boring (male) characters. Despite its pedigree, the latest Ryan Murphy/Netflix collaboration simply isn’t worth the leap.

It is a show that is smug and obtuse enough to believe la la land’s self-regarding idea that celluloid art directly shapes our lives. ... It’s a crushing disappointment nevertheless. Not ready for its closeup, Mr DeMille.

Even though their characters are poorly written, a few of the performers do manage to help matters with their energy and command. LuPone is never not fun to watch, Joe Mantello is beautifully restrained as a gay producer, and Holland Taylor is moving as a lonely casting director.

A vivid but unconvincing ensemble fantasy about who gets to go to Dreamland and who has to keep dreaming.

Hollywood can never decide whether it wants to be an aspirational woke-alternate-reality fantasy or a nihilistic black comedy, and its conflicting tones sit uneasily together.

Some episodes, Hollywood is a sweetly placating Tinseltown fantasy. Others, it’s a grim nightmare about a bitter town and a bitter era. Those two halves never quite fuse together, leaving Hollywood stranded between its poles. It’s intermittently engaging, but often curiously off-putting, an undone dish of conflicting tastes.

Craven and corrupt, studios did ruin lives and stoke racism. But a seven-hour Velveeta-smothered corrective, along with a few nice performances and some genuinely awful ones (discretion is indeed the better part of valor on this last point, by the way)? Get me rewrite, kid. STAT. Overindulgent, overwrought, overdone.

Truly insulting stinkers are a special breed, though, and I’ll admit I have a weird fondness for them. There’s something pleasurable about trying to sift through the shambolic wreckage of The Witcher to figure out how it got to be this way; similarly, I would love to be able to stop watching Quibi and yet I gave it many, many hours of my time. This club is where Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood belongs.

What results is a Franken-show that’d have done the old Universal monster movies proud, lurching and stumbling through its story’s convolutions with great purpose but little worth saying. ... The first outright dud of his post-“Glee” career.