First Look: Ryan Murphy’s sumptuous new limited series ‘Hollywood’ for Netflix flips the script on race, gender and sexuality

The Golden Age of Hollywood gets a major makeover with the new limited series from one of television’s biggest directing and producing icons, Ryan Murphy (Glee, American Crime Story, American Horror Story) with Ian Brennan as a part of Murphy’s massive deal with Netflix and does it ever look like glitzy, juicy fun.

Hollywood follows a group of aspiring actors and filmmakers in post-World War II Hollywood as they try to make it in Tinseltown — no matter the cost. Each character offers a unique glimpse behind the gilded curtain of Hollywood’s Golden Age, spotlighting the unfair systems and biases across race, gender and sexuality that continue to this day. Provocative and incisive, Hollywood exposes and examines decades-old power dynamics, and what the entertainment landscape might look like if they had been dismantled.

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: 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. Hollywood is a love letter to our little industry town where dreamers dwell, stars are born, and magic transcends reality.

Writer/Director/Executive Producer Janet Mock

Hollywood stars David Corenswet as Jack, Darren Criss as Raymond, Jeremy Pope as Archie, Laura Harrier as Camille, Samara Weaving as Claire, Dylan McDermott as Ernie, Holland Taylor as Ellen Kincaid, Patti LuPone as Avis, Jim Parsons as Henry Willson, Jake Picking as Rock Hudson, Joe Mantello as Dick, and Maude Apatow as Henrietta.

Netflix will release the entire limites series on May 1. Here is your first look.