‘Swimming With Sharks’ Is a Hollywood-Assistant Drama That Spirals Into Madness: TV Review
variety.comDaniel D'Addario Chief TV Critic“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.
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.
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