Ryan Murphy's Hollywood is laughably self-satisfied and willfully naïve about complex real-world problems

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/12/opinion/netflix-hollywood-ryan-murphy.html

"Is it possible for a fantasy to be too absurd?" asks Aisha Harris of Murphy's Netflix alt-history series. She adds: "What if a handful of straight (and ostensibly straight) white people were actually willing to risk their careers and reputations in order to create opportunities for the underrepresented? Both counterfactuals are played out in Hollywood, but they rest oddly alongside one another — one is playfully subversive; the other a retread of simplistic progressive logic about how to combat systemic oppression. The show’s appeals to the benevolent hearts and minds of 'good' people are maddeningly naïve. I devoured each episode anyway. A pattern develops throughout the series: Someone white or white-passing makes an impassioned plea for a more powerful white person to take a chance on hiring a person of color for a role. The argument is framed purely in do-gooder terms — an opportunity to 'change the world,' to look back on this moment years from now knowing they 'did the right thing.'" The problem, she says, is that Hollywood doesn't reflect reality. "That’s because history has proved that even for those who have been sympathetic to the causes of the marginalized, there’s only so much power they are willing to concede. It’s how we end up with, say, the North capitulating to the bruised egos of the side that lost the Civil War, or politicians catering to the religious right in the race to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment," says Harris. This has been as true of the entertainment industry as it has been of government — which is why it remains a big deal when a Black Panther or a Crazy Rich Asians or a Wonder Woman gets made, much less finds success. Those films were borne of hard-won fights for equality. And yet I keep coming back to the happy endings of the Hollywood characters. 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."