Swimming with Sharks

Fabulous transition performance from Kiernan Shipka, who sheds her girl-next-door image, as the deranged Lou seeking to find her place in Hollywood. Other than that though, this show is a mashup of clichés with an overly elaborate and ultimately unbelievable spine.

Had potential, but overplayed its hand.

This is nothing like the original movie starring Kevin Spacey which was about a Hollywood monster turning an innocent dreamer into another Hollywood monster. This is the exact opposite. It's more like THE TEMP or SINGLE WHITE FEMALE (i.e. Intern from hell).

Not sure why you would do that to this theme, but if you know that it's not totally terrible, though it is choppy and cryptic with not much character development.

This may look like prestige TV, but rest assured that it is not. It is entertaining, though. The plot twists are out of a soap opera and characters are as clichéd as they come. Donald Sutherland playing his best Harvey Weinstein is a scene stealer.

This series deserves my rating of 7 simply because it is very dark (and by "dark" I mean noir and not poorly lit), something Hollywood rarely wants to touch with a ten-foot pole. Film makers aren't afraid of violence, not even a little, but it's mostly of the cartoonish variety like John Wick of superhero doggerel in which there are no consequences for the actions. They will show brains painting walls that would put Jackson Pollock to shame, but dark and noir scare the crap out of most film makers. That's too edgy, too emotional, so better just stick to over-the-top Road Runner cartoon violence so as not to upset anyone.

I would rate this even higher if they hadn't thrown a monkey wrench into the pacing in the middle episodes with a few inexplicable music videos which completely deflated the tension they had built in the beginning.

*The Bad Seed 1956 knew a lot about being dark. Totally creeped me out when I watched it when I was ten or eleven.

Swimming With Sharks is a case where the puzzle pieces don't fit but we're just forcing them in place, mostly based on tropes.

We have the out of town intern, Lou, played by Kiernan Shipka. She's joining the team of Fountain Pictures, run by studio chief, Joyce Holt (Diane Kruger) who still must answer to the sickly owner of the company, Redmond (Donald Sutherland). And Lou has her menacing overseers, the guys running the intern pool Alex and Travis (Ross Butler and Thomas Dekker).

The meteoric rise of Lou, from her first placement right outside of Ms. Holt's office, to becoming Holt's essential right hand is similar in tone to Don Draper's history from Ms. Shipka's previous series "Mad Men." Only Lou is more unsavory than even the 1960s Ad Exec in ways that maybe even Don himself might raise an eyebrow over.

The problem is in all of the elements to do with these characters, what we would expect them to do and what we believe about them, based on what they have done. In many of these cases, characters do or state things that don't seem to fit who they are or what we believe they would likely do in that circumstance and that always spoils the narrative.

Most importantly, with the character of Lou, I expected her to have a plan for every possible contingent, based on how she had dreamed, since childhood, of being where she was and how she has arranged everything to get herself to the upper reaches of Hollywood.

There are some definite good moments for each actor throughout, but they get skewered by all of the unbelievable ones. Everybody here deserved better.