Hollywood: Season 1

For everything it seems to get right, something about Hollywood seems all wrong.

A show about Tinseltown that chose to confront and prod at these continuing, dispiriting realities rather than concoct its own vapid, hubristic fantasies would be worth 10 times this one.

Hollywood manages to be simultaneously more cynical and lazy than anything Tinseltown turned out during that age.

It's a pity that 'Hollywood' doesn't let us figure out the irony for ourselves, but instead underlines it with earnest speeches. However, all the signalling doesn't spoil what is essentially a glossy treat.

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.

It glided over my brain like a feather boa, beautiful, silly, dissolute.

It is a baffling Hindenburg of TV.

Costumes by Sarah Evelyn and Lou Eyrich, coupled with Matthew Flood Ferguson's production design, allow us to slip into this world... Still, echoing the eponymous setting, there are serious flaws hidden beneath the glossy veneer.

It's a noble thought and an audacious premise. It doesn't work here, not because of the fancifulness... but because of the story and character strains that "Hollywood" visibly goes through to steer to its conclusion.

There's plenty of razzle-dazzle in "Hollywood" that keeps it humming along, even as it overpreaches. At an efficiently brisk seven episodes, it's nobody's idea of a dull time.

The exact degree of ironic self-awareness here is hard to reckon, but "Hollywood," for all its exaggerations, feels sincere... Yet it's this very sincerity, even generosity - its best features, really - that keep the series from being lifelike.

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.

Stylish, strongly acted and completely disingenuous about the arc of the moral universe.

“Hollywood” is just happy to paint a picture of what could have been, rather than work to say anything new about what Hollywood could become.

Purple, manipulative, shameless – the old-school Hollywood of Ryan Murphy’s dreams might hustle like the real thing, but it doesn’t much look like it.

Netflix series from the ‘Glee’ team pairs real players of 1940s Tinseltown with fictional ones, but the revisionist history falters midway through.

I do believe movies can change the world, but it’s a complex process, never quite moving from point A to point 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.

Hollywood’s message is clear, even if its messaging is muddled. The series is engrossing throughout and its optimism is undeniably winning.

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.

Leaning further in the direction of a Capra flick than the hyper-violent revenge fantasy of Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist Hollywood tale, Murphy’s miniseries is about using your power to raise up others, and taking chances to push for change from within.