Hollywood on Netflix couldn’t start streaming soon enough.
On Thursday, Netflix released the first set of images from Murphy’s upcoming limited series, Hollywood, starring some of Murphy’s favorite actors, including Darren Criss, Patti LuPone, and Dylan McDermott. Honestly, this show sounds exactly like the gorgeous, aspirational period piece we all need in our lives right now. Here’s everything we know about the upcoming series that you should bookmark on Netflix.
The plot follows an alternate 1940s Hollywood. The limited series, which Murphy—who has brought you American Horror Story, Glee, The Politician, etc—co-created with Ian Brennan, will mix real Hollywood figures and fictional characters from the 1940s to reimagine what Hollywood could have been. As the show’s creators noted, it’s an “aspirational tale of what ifs.”
“With the present so fraught and the future uncertain, we turned to the past for direction, uncovering buried history to spin an aspirational tale of what ifs,” Janet Mock, the show’s executive producer, writer, and director shared with The Hollywood Reporter. “What if a band of outsiders were given a chance to tell their own story? What if the person with greenlight power was a woman? The screenwriter a black man? What if the heroine was a woman of color? The matinee idol openly gay? And what if they were all invited into the room where the decisions are made, entering fully and unapologetically themselves to leave victorious and vaunted, their place in history cemented?”
It harkens back to another Murphy miniseries. According to Murphy, he’s wanted to create something around an alternate Hollywood universe since he created the FX miniseries, Feud.
“Ever since I did ‘Feud’, I had been working on a piece about the buried history of Hollywood,” he shared with USA Today. “I was very interested, even as a young person, in three people: Rock Hudson, Anna May Wong, and Hattie McDaniel. I’d been sort of noodling with that and then Darren Criss and I had dinner after [‘The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story’] and we were talking about what we wanted to work on next. And we both wanted to do something that would be inspirational, upbeat and that had a happy ending, that was about victories.”
The cast is a who’s who of Hollywood. Want to watch all the coolest people in modern-day Hollywood in one show? Now’s your chance. Like we said above, the cast is stacked with Murphy favorites including Laura Harrier, David Corenswet, Samara Weaving, Holland Taylor, Patti LuPone, and The Big Bang Theory‘s Jim Parsons. That’s just the start of this A-list roster.
__It starts streaming May 1.__The seven-episode limited series premieres on Netflix on Friday, May 1. If you don’t have Netflix by now what are you waiting for? Beyond bookmarking “Hollywood” here are 51 movies you can stream on the platform right now.
Let’s just marvel at some more photos from the series…
Yeah, I’m marking my calendar right now.