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Instead of directly addressing and deconstructing the current cultural landscape, exploring how things got so bad and offering a bleakly satirical look at how things might change, Swimming With Sharks is really a dark comedy about erotic obsession, with an undercurrent about mental illness that gets even shorter shrift than the Hollywood power dynamics.

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This is a fact that I confess astounded and distracted me, because when series development was announced, bringing Swimming With Sharks to the Time’s Up/#MeToo era - a moment at which the pathological behavior of notorious figures like Scott Rudin has gone from open secret to the stuff of voluminously researched exposés - actually felt like a really fertile idea. While Swimming With Sharks is quick to acknowledge that power relations in Tinseltown are a cesspool that poisons everything and everybody that comes through the Dream Factory, that’s not really what the show is about.

Swimming With Sharks was created and written in its entirety by Beverly Hills, 90210 favorite Kathleen Robertson and directed in its entirety by Tucker Gates - they worked together previously on Bates Motel - and it features Kiernan Shipka as Lou, newly hired intern to Joyce (Diane Kruger), famously abusive head of Fountain Pictures.īut is Joyce actually abusive, or is she a victim of the Hollywood patriarchy - a deliciously grotesque Donald Sutherland plays Joyce’s decrepit boss, Redmond - and an industry-infecting gender double standard? There wouldn’t be much empathy here if the answer weren’t the latter.Īnd is Lou actually the wide-eyed, fresh-off-the-bus innocent she seems, or is she a vicious, manipulative social climber willing to do anything it takes to get a piece of a mythical studio-era Hollywood dream imparted to her by her mother (Robertson, fleetingly)? There wouldn’t be much fun here if the answer weren’t closer to the latter. It’s also, at every turn, a show that opts for down-and-dirty entertainment at the expense of a more tangibly substantive show that appears to have been sent out by its tyrannical boss on a menial errand. Originally developed for the dearly departed Quibi and now launching as a Roku Channel original, the six-episode Swimming With Sharks is a fast-moving roll around in the mud of Hollywood, requiring precisely zero awareness of the film. Discovery Among Top Hollywood Stock Gainers in First Quarter

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