I watched Netflix’s Hollywood a week ago and enjoyed it; lots of fun, though draggy here and there, and a bit soapy, too, if you catch my drift. It attracted a lot of commentary, much around its alternative history premise. As you may know, it’s set in Hollywood in the late 1940s and includes (versions of) real people (e.g. Anna May Wong, Rock Hudson, and Hattie McDaniels) amid mostly fictional characters. This is a world in which a gay black screen writer gets his script made into a film directed by a half-Filipino director and with a black star. Not only that, but the movie’s a hit, takes home some Oscars, and the gay screenwriter and Rock Hudson hold hands on the red carpet in front of all the cameras. What fun.
Some of the commentary was not at all happy with this alternative version of our world, such as this piece in the New York Post, Netflix’s ‘Hollywood’ is a reality-altering, potentially dangerous TV series, but I think Aisha Harris gets things right in The New York Times, In Netflix’s ‘Hollywood,’ One Movie Fixes Racism. Hooray! – clever title, that; I wonder who wrote it. She’s quite aware of Hollywood’s history on these matters, and ours as well. Given all the reservations, all the work yet to be done:
... There is something to be said for the show’s fluffy confection of ahistoricism when it’s not indulging in myths of racial reconciliation and movies-as-changemakers.
The happy resolutions conjured up by message films from the “Hollywood” era almost always benefited straight white people and no one else. Here is a fantasy set in the past where women, people of color and queer characters ultimately win, too.
Yes, the Avises of the world are able to pat themselves on the backs for doing the right thing. But Archie, Camille and Anna May also get to pursue their dreams and see their success open doors for others. They survive, they flourish, they are happy.
A part of me can’t ignore what it feels like to see this Technicolor spectacle populated by these faces and experiences, to see the 1940s depicted through a 2020 lens — browner, less sexually repressed, more women calling the shots. “Movies don’t just show us how the world is, they show us how the world can be,” says one character in “Hollywood.” [...]
The show is willfully naïve and laughably self-satisfied. But as far as dreams go, it’s also progress.
I conclude that the series presupposes an audience with some sophistication in these matters, an audience that knows things weren’t at all like that back in the day, and that we’ve still got a ways to go. But that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun, does it?
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