‘Swimming With Sharks’ Is a Hollywood-Assistant Drama That Spirals Into Madness: TV Review
“Power is a dangerous, delicate creature,” Kiernan Shipka’s character tells us in voice-over as she zips up her dress. “Intoxicating. And fickle.” These are the sort of truisms that “Swimming With Sharks,” a new Roku Channel original series, doles out with a heavy hand — ponderous enough to obscure that there’s little new on offer here.
The show, an update of the 1994 drama about a tyrannical studio executive and his ambitious assistant created by Kathleen Robertson, doesn’t have much interesting to say about, say, the dynamic between higher-ups and underlings in Hollywood, its putative topic; its gender-flipping its two leads (the exec is now played by Diane Kruger) seems to have been done solely to generate a sense of scandal in the sexual tension between the two. That gets at just how un-2022 this series feels: It gawks at women in power who are drawn to one another as if that’s the end of a story, not a starting point.
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Shipka, of “Mad Men,” here stars as Lou Simms, who presents as a chipper go-getter eager to be of assistance as an entry-level employee at Fountain Pictures. The place is run by Joyce Holt (Kruger), a dominant and intimidating presence who, herself, is subject to the whims of an industry macher played by Donald Sutherland. Joyce is extremely demanding of her assistants (Thomas Dekker and Ross Butler), who wait on her every whim and then pass on the nastiness to their own underling.
There’s the grain of an idea here: the chain of abuse runs all the way to the top of the industry, and Joyce — even as her toughness as a boss tends toward the sketchily drawn — is implicated as both perpetrator and victim. Unfortunately, the show skitters away from anything quite so complex, devoting more and more of the half-hour episodes’ running time to Lou’s fantastical backstory, her malign intentions toward Joyce, and her power to carry out her will. Soon enough, there’s a body count. To argue that to get ahead in the industry, one must be deviously ambitious is one thing. To make a show about an omnipotent psychopath sends the story to a place beyond credibility — and, at times, beyond even Shipka’s considerable abilities to convey pensiveness and hidden motives.
Which is too bad: There’s certainly work to be done excavating the way bosses and assistants engage with one another. (Kitty Green’s film “The Assistant,” with Julia Garner as its star, is perhaps the single most effective work of art to directly deal with the #MeToo movement.) But of all the things this show could say about power — how it works, how it shifts over time, how the attempt to obtain it transforms us — simply saying that it’s dangerous isn’t good enough.
“Swimming With Sharks” will premiere on the Roku Channel on Friday, April 15.
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