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At the Golden Tip service station, somewhere in Los Angeles in the late 1940s, they pump more than gas. Drive up, tell the handsome attendant “I want to go to Dreamland,” and he’s yours, for a fee.
Everybody wants to go to Dreamland, right? That’s why people go to the movies, and why they go into the movies. This is how Jack (David Corenswet), a war veteran who wants to be a screen star, ends up at the Golden Tip in Netflix’s “Hollywood,” hustling to support his pregnant wife (Maude Apatow) while he chases his other hustle.
Jack is struggling, unconnected and of questionable talent. Yet he’s one of the lucky ones: He’s white, straight and easy on the eyes. The seven gilded episodes of “Hollywood,” arriving Friday, introduce a broad cast of would-bes and coulda-beens — black, gay, female — in a vivid but unconvincing ensemble fantasy about who gets to go to Dreamland and who has to keep dreaming.
The Golden Tip is run by Ernie (Dylan McDermott, looking like the porn version of Ronald Colman), a former silent-film star with the most conspicuous cough since “La Bohême.” It employs Archie (Jeremy Pope), a gay black screenwriter trying to sell a script based on the suicide of the starlet Peg Entwistle, who leapt to her death from the H in the Hollywoodland sign.
He finds a taker in Raymond (the Murphy regular Darren Criss), an idealistic young director who sees Archie’s script as a potential career-maker for his girlfriend, Camille (Laura Harrier). The problem: She’s also black, typecast in supporting roles as a comic-relief maid and constantly badgered to read her lines like Hattie McDaniel. (McDaniel later turns up, played by Queen Latifah, and recalls waiting to collect her “Gone With the Wind” Oscar in a segregated hotel.)
A starring role is not in the stars for someone like Camille in 1940s Hollywood. That’s just the way things were.
But “Hollywood” asks: What if they weren’t? The bid to make Archie’s movie starts as a glitzy, funny, gimlet-eyed dissection of bigotry and power. Then it lurches, halfway through, into a pep talk about what some kids can accomplish if they gather up their moxie and put on a show.
The pleasures of “Hollywood” are in its eye for historical details and its lusty, swellegant period cosplay. As Henry Willson — a real-life gay agent and power player — Jim Parsons pays out gleeful barbs like a sarcastic slot machine. Patti LuPone is a regal delight as a studio executive’s wife who hires Jack as a gigolo. (Lana Turner’s discovery story it is not — though Schwab’s drugstore is just a short hop away.)
The Golden Tip is based on an actual gas-station brothel operated by Scotty Bowers, one of several repurposings of history in the series. Henry signs Rock Hudson (Jake Picking), portrayed as a dim-bulb sweetheart. We meet Anna May Wong (Michelle Krusiec), robbed of a potential Oscar role in “The Good Earth.” A bacchanal at George Cukor’s mansion shows gay Hollywood at play. (Paget Brewster is a bawdy hoot as Tallulah Bankhead.) We’re told the story of William Haines, a gay decorator and onetime silent-film star who refused to live in the closet.
This is “Hollywood” at its most absorbing, nostalgic yet caustic. It serves up burnished postwar glamour while resurfacing the stories and bodies sacrificed to maintain the movies’ homogeneous sheen — the artists of color, the closeted executives, the overlooked women.
At the same time, it echoes what hasn’t changed, especially regarding sexual abuse. Henry preys on his own clients, including Rock, and in a pointed bit of casting, Mira Sorvino, who spoke out against Harvey Weinstein, plays a once-starlet trapped in a sexual arrangement with a powerful producer.
Then “Hollywood” takes a turn, which it seems to rationalize, in a meta way, through the discussions over Archie’s script. A studio executive asks, why make the audience fall in love with an actress only to have her lose her dream and end it all? Don’t folks deserve to leave the picture show with some hope?
So it is in the series, which becomes a bit like Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” except that the wrong to be corrected is not the Manson murders but the generational killing of careers and silencing of voices.
“Hollywood” joins a boomlet of other TV alt-histories, like HBO’s “The Plot Against America” (set in a fascist 1940s United States) and Apple TV Plus’s “For All Mankind” (which imagines how society and world history might have changed if a woman had set foot on the moon in 1969). It argues that the path of history was not set by intractable forces but might have been rerouted had a few of the right people done the right thing.
It’s a noble thought and an audacious premise. It doesn’t work here, not because of the fancifulness — you are allowed to take liberties in Dreamland — but because of the story and character strains that “Hollywood” visibly goes through to steer to its conclusion.
Story lines that start out cynical suddenly turn syrupy. Characters develop consciences and talents they had shown little evidence of. The production takes on a forced sunny tone, as if the whole series had landed in Oz and the screen turned from black and white to color. It’s meant to be inspiring, but it only makes the viewer more conscious of the contortions the series goes through to tie itself up in a neat bow. (The last episode is titled “A Hollywood Ending.”)
One character who maintains some measure of complexity is Parsons’s jaded, hungry Henry, who gives a meta critique after screening a cut of the movie-within-a-show: “There is something about the ending that I just don’t buy.” It’s a knowing, self-aware line, but in the end “Hollywood” doesn’t heed that voice. It is determined to haul you to Dreamland, no matter how bumpy the ride.
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