- Network: Amazon Prime , AMAZON
- Series Premiere Date: Jul 28, 2017
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Critic Reviews
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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.
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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.
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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]
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The Last Tycoon, like its lead, is spread too thin and is a bit shallow.
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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.
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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.
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It’s ultimately too restrained and conventional to qualify as a must-see.
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A wildly uneven series -- a Hollywood melodrama whose frothy soapiness produces a few strong performances and a host of clichés.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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[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.
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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.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 13 out of 22
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Mixed: 4 out of 22
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Negative: 5 out of 22
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Jul 28, 2017
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Aug 1, 2017
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Sep 14, 2017