Amazon's "The Last Tycoon" is ambitious, but flat

A promotional poster featuring Matt Bomer, Lily Collins, and Kelsey Grammar.

The beauty about the hour-long TV Drama series is that it can be many things at once. Not everything is about the angst and the sturm und drang all primary characters must go through. A show can take turns being a tragedy, a comedy, a thriller, and a musical. What a show cannot be, if it wants to be successful, is too many things at the same time. After all, 60-minutes isn't that much time.

The Last Tycoon, Amazon Studios' latest foray into original programming, is guilty of this sin. The adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's unfinished novel - set in late 1930s Hollywood - takes elements from great cinema and great television and throws them into the blender. AMC's Mad Men is the Tycoon's clearest inspiration. Sterling-Cooper becomes Brady American Pictures. Don Draper becomes Monroe Stahr, both are the engines powering their respective companies' ambitions.

Hell, even the pilot episode's structure is the same as Mad Men's, only in reverse.

The buck does not stop there. Everybody's favorite classic to love, Casablanca, is transposed into a subplot concerning an enamored writer and a concert cellist who had to flee Europe because of the Nazis. Merle Oberon and her mother (and Imitation of Life) also get a nod.

And while the series title comes from a Fitzgerald novel, the show takes greater inspiration from Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run? - a hard-hitting novel that attempted to portray the studios at their worst.

The show, like the book every person in the movie business is supposed to hate, has the same flaw. It loves Hollywood a little too much. As a result, the story arcs are often too kind to the parties involved. Only the main character is denied what he wants.

That said, The Last Tycoon" is not entirely without merit. The look and design are brilliant to the point of distraction. A 1930s mid-major studio is brought to life, despite not showing us much of old Los Angeles (an impossibility for various reasons). This reviewer would not be surprised to see an Emmy nomination for such a high-quality visual product.

Jennifer Beals puts forth a solid performance as a demanding star with a secret, a surprise considering how little room her character is given to develop. She steals the show in almost every scene she is in. Matt Bomer (Monroe Stahr) and Kelsey Grammer (Pat Brady) are capable, so is Dominique McElligott - another actress harboring a double life. Lily Collins more than looks the part as the studio boss's daughter. All, however, are no match for Beals.

The writing, however, undercuts the show's strengths. Borrowing from previous successful works makes sense, yet it doesn't. Not everything turns out like Stranger Things. Monroe Stahr cannot be Don Draper, Rick Blaine, and Sammy Glick all rolled into one body. No character can without being stretched too thin.

Trite, cliched story lines and overly on-the-nose dialogue weigh down almost every episode. Nazis attempting to impose their will on everyone, a homeless man makes good, the boss's daughter attempts to prove herself, the double lives, the affairs, and the megalomaniac studio head growing increasingly rash. Even the dark side comes across cartoonish.

The Last Tycoon is, in the end, a show with lofty ambitions that falls short of not only its source material, but also the many works that inspired it.