2 New Amazon TV Shows: Matt Bomer Charms as a Movie Tycoon

Photo: Amazon

Amazon premieres two new shows on Friday, pilots in its Amazon Original Series program that you can vote for online. They’re both literary adaptations, with Matt Bomer starring on The Last Tycoon, and Six Feet Under’s Lauren Ambrose in The Interestings.

Bomer is the right face and voice for the TV interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, published posthumously in 1941. I haven’t read it since high school, and therefore was pleasantly hazy on the plot’s details beyond remembering the characters of hustling movie producer Monroe Stahr (modeled on real-life producer Irving Thalberg) and bullying studio head Pat Brady (modeled on the real Louis B. Mayer).

In Amazon’s Last Tycoon, directed by Billy Ray (The Hunger Games), Bomer is a sleek and ambitious Stahr, and Kelsey Grammer is an imperious Brady. The hourlong episode sets up their clash — Stahr wants to produce an uplifting saga of immigrant idealism; Brady wants to crush Stahr’s dream because the budget’s too big. This Last Tycoon project itself looks mighty expensive, complete with elaborate sets for other movies in production on the studio lot where Stahr and Brady work, and posh parties they attend with what look like hundreds of extras dancing and swilling champagne.

There are serious themes in the story — Stahr is so work-driven because he’s burying the grief he can barely endure from the death of his actress-wife two years earlier; Brady is caving in to the anti-Semitic casting demands of a German emissary in this pre-World War II era because, as the studio head puts it, “Germany is the second-biggest foreign market” for movies. It’s difficult to see how this material could be turned into a series, but the Amazon producers do have the fact that Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel leaves things rather open-ended, and therefore there’s plenty of room for invention. Bomer looks great in the early-1940s suits and has just the right combination of silky persuasion and agonized grief.

The Interestings is an adaptation of Meg Wolitzer’s 2013 bestselling novel that follows a group of friends from summer camp in the 1970s to the present. It begins by introducing us to a bunch of kids at a creative camp for the artistically inclined, and if you can be charmed by a gaggle of adolescents singing, quoting from plays and novels, and arguing about the merits of Günter Grass and Anaïs Nin, you’ll make it to their more interesting grown-up selves.

Once Lauren Ambrose shows up as Jules, a once-aspiring actress who decided to put aside her dreams to become a wife, mother, and a very half-hearted therapist, the hourlong pilot becomes an interesting study in how people grow up either fulfilling or quashing their most-cherished hopes. The cast includes David Krumholtz as the rich but unhappy creator of Figland, a Simpsons-like animation success story; he’s married to Ash (Jessica Paré from Mad Men), who’s not overjoyed at living in her husband’s shadow.

I never read Wolitzer’s novel, but The Interestings on TV and as directed by Mike Newell (Four Weddings and a Funeral) successfully avoids what could have been a slavish Big Chill-like premise of old friends reuniting in adulthood, with a Big Secret looming over them. I was certainly intrigued enough to want to know where Jules and her friends go from here in their miserable adulthoods. Of the two potential series, I liked both, but The Interestings is the one I’d vote to continue watching.

The Last Tycoon and The Interestings are streaming on Amazon Video now.