A foray into television reviews

Dear audience ,

What follows below is an essay I wrote as a review of Ryan Murphy's new Netflix series, Hollywood. As an alternate history depicting a more racially and sexually progressive Golden Age of Film, Hollywood is part of an established subgenre of fiction. (Technically, science-fiction - Philip K. Dick wrote perhaps the most famous alternate history novel ever, The Man in the High Castle.) Unfortunately, it fails to engage with real history, and so tells us little about the past or the present. Full text below:

Wasted Genre

How Ryan Murphy failed as an alternate historian

In the last few years, alternate history has developed its own niche on the small screen. Traditionally considered a sub-genre of science fiction, alternate history works are set in universes where a key historical event happened differently, or failed to occur, creating a new parallel history to our own. The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick (1964), the mother of all “Nazi victory” novels, is perhaps the best-known example. Some science-fiction writers, like Harry Turtledove, S.M. Stirling and Eric Flint, specialize in alternate worlds. Mainstream writers have dabbled in parallel timelines too, like Kingsley Amis (The Alteration, (1976)), Len Deighton (SS-GB (1978)), Philip Roth (The Plot Against America (2004)) and Michael Chabon (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)).

In recent years, alternate history has migrated to the ever-expanding universe of streaming and broadcast television. The Man in the High Castle and SS-GB have both been adapted for television, while For All Mankind and Counterpart are original alternate-history scenarios. And now we can add Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood, which imagines a highly original divergence from our reality. Sadly, it does so without saying anything about our own history or our present, which is why it fails. (Plot spoilers follow.)

Alternate history is a genre dominated by stories of war and conflict (the Nazis win, the Confederates win, the Soviets win), so Murphy’s proposed scenario is pretty original: What if a movie studio in the late 1940s had decided to defy racism and the Hays Production Code to make a film starring an African-American woman, who was part of an interracial couple? In this case, a gay African-American screenwriter, Archie Coleman (Jeremy Pope) manages to get his script for Peg sold to Ace Studios, where a half-Filipino director, Raymond Ainsley (Darren Criss) becomes its director. Peg begins as a fictionalization of the real story of white British actress Peg Entwistle, who committed suicide in 1932 by jumping off the Hollywood sign, but Ainsley makes the protagonist an African-American woman, Meg Ennis. When Ace’s philistine boss (Rob Reiner) suffers a coronary, his wife Avis Amberg (Patti LuPone, magnificently turbaned) becomes acting CEO, and green-lights the film with Camille Washington (Laura Harrier, from BlacKKKlansman) as Meg and Jack Castello (David Corenswet, The Politician) as her white boyfriend and Rock Hudson in a minor role. The result is a smash hit, and a rich haul of Oscars. To top it off, Archie and Rock come out as an openly gay couple at the ceremony.

This has all the makings of a fascinating story, even without Murphy’s wider exploration of the LGBT experience in Hollywood of the day. Hollywood’s depiction of this is certainly racy and compelling, drawing heavily on Scotty Bowers’s memoirs of running a male prostitution ring out of a gas station, and on stories of an abusive gay agent, Henry Willson, played here by Jim Parsons. Murphy does connect the exclusion of African-Americans, LGBT people, women and Asian-Americans, and devotes one subplot to winning Anna May Wong (Michelle Krusiec) the recognition she was denied when she was passed over for the lead in The Good Earth.

You can enjoy Hollywood at the level of an LA Noir, or a period piece, or just because you love watching Patti LuPone play a diva (and David Corenswet wear a tank-top). But as a work of alternate history, it has a lot of potential as a vehicle to examine both its time and ours. How would Ace Studios and Meg have navigated the open racism of the late 1940s? World War II had produced considerable social ferment and energized the African-American civil-rights movement, but it also produced McCarthyism; Meg is made in 1947, the same year Harry Truman introduced loyalty investigations for federal employees.

Just dealing with how the Hollywood crew could have pulled Meg off in 1947 would be a full season of television. But Murphy could make a whole series out of the ripple effects through US history – on the Civil Rights Movement, on McCarthyism, and on Hollywood itself, a town that was much more evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats in the 1940s. (Two Hollywood Republicans, Robert Montgomery and Hedda Hopper, have cameo appearances in Hollywood.)

Finally, Hollywood could pose general questions about what causes political change, and how change happens in the United States. Is it enough to improve representation in the media to create real equality? How does representation cause political and social change? How do conservative forces respond to such challenges? What is the role of media in constructing political and social narratives? And how do advances in public representation affect one’s willingness to fight private, sexual exploitation, which is rife in Hollywood and a central issue of modern activism?

The problem is that Hollywood engages with almost none of these questions.

Murphy’s tale is set in 1947 and 1948, but in reality it takes place in a vague “past.” Murphy references some bits of Hollywood’s own history, but makes almost no connection between what’s going on at Ace Studios and the politics of the time. Eleanor Roosevelt (Harriet Sansom Harris) gets 10 minutes in one episode to talk about the importance of representation; Ace Amberg mentions Communism once. No one utters the words “NAACP,” or mentions Jackie Robinson, who desegregated baseball in 1947. Meg is a hit because … well, Meg is a hit. Protests “melted away.” We learn nothing about the politics or culture or struggles of a period of great ferment in the US. It could have been set in the 1920s or the 1960s for all it matters.

Since Murphy doesn’t engage with actual US history, Hollywood struggles to answer any questions of historical or social significance. Does representation matter as an engine of social equality? That would seem to be the question that most interests Murphy, and plenty of real activists have made argued in the affirmative, and not just in the 21st century. (Martin Luther King Jr. used it to convince Nichelle Nichols to continue playing Lt. Uhura on Star Trek in the 1960s.) But Murphy ends the series on Meg’s triumph at the Oscars, so we can’t really know. We don’t see the NAACP using Meg as a way to campaign for equality, or hear about minority candidates running in the 1948 presidential elections. Murphy doesn’t connect the film’s victory to the dynamics of wider society. It just hangs in space, a glittering fairy tale.

This failure to engage with real history becomes especially galling in the final episode, when Archie and Rock Hudson come out as a couple at the Oscars and set off a gay-rights movement (at least among men). There had been openly homosexual people before – Weimar Germany had a gay-rights movement and gay press – but in the United States, no such movement existed until the 1950s, and certainly not publicly. No state repealed its sodomy laws before the 1960s; California only did in 1976. We learn nothing from such an outlandish plot development, no matter how attractive it may be.

How could Hollywood have done this right? A good example of TV alternate history is Apple+’s For All Mankind. The show imagines a world where the USSR beats the US to the Moon, and then lands a woman there as part of the second lunar landing. The result is the recruitment of women and minority astronauts, and an energized feminist movement. Though For All Mankind isn’t perfect – it burns through plot at an alarming rate – the show does an excellent job of plugging its teleplay into real historical processes. Though not often acknowledged, the Cold War was a key factor in US policy towards civil rights; Jim Crow died partly because it was too embarrassing for the federal government to defend against Communist attacks on the international stage. It is wholly plausible that fear of the Soviets could impel feminist progress in the United States. In the meantime, the show makes clear that advances for women do not automatically apply to other minority groups; LGBT employees of NASA stay in the closet as security risks.

I imagine Hollywood stems from a noble dream – to reimagine the past in a way that the present can feel proud of. Murphy wants to reimagine a heritage he clearly loves through the lens of a more just present. Maybe that works as a fantasy. But it doesn’t work as an alternate history, because it doesn’t teach us much about our past or our present. For that reason, it also doesn’t work very well as a drama.