Once upon a time in Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood

HOLLYWOOD NEVER STOPS FEELING NOSTALGIC FOR ITS golden age. For the Coen brothers, it’s a world of slumming playwrights, cigar-chomping execs and gossip columnists digging for dirt on fertile ground. Best Picture winner The Artist was a bittersweet remembrance of silent film. And last year’s Quentin Tarantino hit Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood imagined the studio system and its cowboys winning out over a new generation of hippies and radicals.

Now Ryan Murphy, whose 2017 FX docudrama amended one slice of studio history, reimagines the whole industry in the boldly titled miniseries His take is as fantastical as Tarantino’s, but as you’d expect from made Marcia Clark a feminist hero, it’s also far more progressive. Black, Asian-American, female and queer characters are the stars of Murphy and co-creator Ian Brennan’s story. If only that story, for all its glitzy fun, weren’t so glib and self-important.