The Last Tycoon

Amazon’s Tycoon is the TV equivalent of a great beach book: a page-turner with larger-than-life characters, set in a glitzy, gossipy world of secrets. I watched the entire season over a few days, mostly because I was having too much fun to stop.

A lovely period piece that contains several top-notch performances. Featuring Kelsey Grammer, Matt Bomer and Jennifer Beals doing some of their best work, The Last Tycoon wraps its most unforgiving truths expensive satin and drapes them in softly lit diamonds. At its best, the series recalls the melancholy elegance of some of the best films of the 1930s.

The result is a glossy look at the time period that, despite leaning on some familiar emotional and story territory, still makes for an engaging, enjoyable viewing experience.

Tycoon manages to capture the wistful tone Fitzgerald so often employed, while also being a breezy binge-watch. The author may never have finished his story, but the Amazon series makes a strong case for continuing it.

Matt Bomer is magnetic as Monroe Stahr, a golden-boy producer drive to churn out premium content to keep a struggling dream factory afloat. [21/28 July 2017, p.113]

Thought-provoking and melancholy, like all good F. Scott Fitzgerald stories, The Last Tycoon delivers a good summer watch. ... All this said, The Last Tycoon has taken some critical heat, and not without cause. It has several unsparkling passages and weak spots.

As a drama, The Last Tycoon is slightly less successful. Occasionally plodding and without a lot to say in the early going that isn’t spelled out in capital letters--NAZIS = BAD!--early episodes offer good, not great drama.

The Amazon series can play like an old Hollywood movie one minute, self-consciously gabby and filled with witticisms. The next, it’s a smart glitzy contemporary soap opera or sly but telling commentary on the entertainment business. Sometimes it bounces a bit too much between the different aspects. Sometimes things mesh nicely, and the series is never boring.

At its best, The Last Tycoon is an absorbing trip back to Hollywood's not-so-Golden Age. And even when it slips, it's still pretty good melodrama, with desperate characters, unexpected deaths and gorgeous people pretending they're keeping it together even when they're not.

Despite a somewhat dull leading man, The Last Tycoon is a relatively successful series, far more realistic and multifaceted than many of its fellows that attempt to show the seedier side of moviemaking in the Golden Age.

The Last Tycoon is so sumptuous that it’s easy to overlook how pedestrian the story often is. That’s not immediately apparent because what’s onscreen is stunning.

Melodrama has its pleasures, and some viewers will doubtless happily be caught in the stories’ myriad threads. And some performances win out over the material, most notably Rosemarie DeWitt as Brady's wife, Rose, who feels complicated and touching and human with whatever dramatic heavy lifting she's asked to do.

Amazon's The Last Tycoon is about a man who's good at his job and--contrary to Fitzgerald's view of the human condition--the pleasure of retreating into historical fantasy. It's a missed opportunity. One that, after a gorgeous 10 hours, you may not remember.

It's absolutely gorgeous to behold in its sumptuous re-creation of 1930s Hollywood glamour, yet glacial in pace, only sporadically catching dramatic fire. [24 Jul - 6 Aug 2017, p.15]

The Last Tycoon, like its lead, is spread too thin and is a bit shallow.

The glimpses of 1930s Hollywood come off like cotton candy dipped in bourbon. ... Of the cast, Grammer manages to keep his head above the material. His studio mogul can be gruff, but Grammer is canny enough to play against the dialogue.

The flaw in this visual and stylistic gem, however, is that the plot beneath all this polish does not contain much in the way of human significance or honesty for a viewer to grab onto.

It’s ultimately too restrained and conventional to qualify as a must-see.

A wildly uneven series -- a Hollywood melodrama whose frothy soapiness produces a few strong performances and a host of clichés.

The show looks beautiful enough and has been so well-cast that those qualities can sometimes be enough when you’re looking for a streaming option on a hot summer weekend. It’s just ironic that a show about the dark underside of Hollywood can only really be appreciated as a superficial distraction.

As long as Stahr remains detached, disturbingly calm in the midst of deception, betrayal and chaos, this Tycoon entertains and engages. By the second half, though, Ray makes the mistake so many others have made in adapting Fitzgerald: He falls back on the melodramatic surface and jettisons the thematic complexity beneath.

Ray and his cast fling themselves wholeheartedly into the spirit and tone of The Last Tycoon, but the material shows its age--melodramatic and sometimes downright campy. Fitzgerald might be the first to admit that the story hasn’t exactly held up.

Admirable care went into the costumes and settings; the script, not so much. There is quite a bit of awkward, didactic dialogue here. Nuance, apparently, had not yet been invented in the 1930s.

Though the early episodes are stuck with some trite dialogue clunkers (“everybody who comes into contact with you pays for it!”), The Last Tycoon is at its best when its showcasing the inner workings of the studios: the jealousy, the rush of production, and the prognostication of what audiences will love.

[The Last Tycoon is] full of awkward, hokey dialogue and clumsy contrivances. Even the production values are mediocre; the occasional clips meant to replicate ’30s-era movies are especially phony and unconvincing. Fitzgerald based Monroe on real-life studio executive Irving Thalberg, but the show has Thalberg appear as a separate character, and the consistently ineffective mix of real and fictional characters highlights how poorly the series captures such a fascinating world.

The suits, hats, gowns, and sets all look smashing, and the actors are strong, particularly Bomer ratcheting up his boyish charm to its most potent in order to convey how justly beloved Monroe is in an otherwise-cutthroat town. But the characters all feel like stock types borrowed from other series, even if many of them were created by Fitzgerald back in his final days, and the whole thing feels a bit dull. I have all the love in the world for tales of pre-WWII Hollywood, but ran out of patience with this one by the end of the fourth episode.

The writing feels (and sounds) like it wants to mimic the era without showing an ounce of believability, even though several fine actors do their best with the material. The overall effect is superficial rather than immersive, and there's rarely a moment in The Last Tycoon when you're not hyper aware that you're watching actors act like they're in a period piece, spouting dialogue that sounds like it's rehashing conversations from past movies.

Tycoon completely misses what makes the movie business so special.