Roku Updates Swimming With Sharks for the Streaming and Post-#MeToo Era

Swimming With Sharks Reboot Takes Aim at Hollywood Bosses

Swimming With Sharks could never be made today. Mostly because it starred Kevin Spacey. 

But that’s not to say that that 1995 film, which starred Spacey as a monstrous Hollywood executive tormenting his assistant (Frank Whaley), wasn’t good, or that it didn’t anticipate a wave of stories many years later about abuse — both sexual and emotional — by powerful bosses, inside and outside of Hollywood. 

Now, Swimming With Sharks has been revived, not as a movie but as a TV series, on Roku’s in-house platform, with six episodes arriving there on April 14. It’s a well-acted show about a worthy subject, but you might feel gross watching it. And the 2019 movie The Assistant, which was something of a roman a clef about Harvey Weinstein, was a better version of this. 

It still has the same premise, but it’s been gender-flipped, with both the boss and assistant now played by women. It’s not a shot-for-shot remake of the film or anything, but it does introduce a character early on, like Benicio Del Toro’s in the movie, who went from tormented assistant to the executive to vice president of production at a studio in very little time. 

The show has also tapped into much more modern concerns about #MeToo, modern-day office politics, and “Girlboss” feminism. On the latter, it’s specifically the way some female bosses use the veneer of feminism to do evil and self-aggrandizing things, especially to other women. 

(Leigh Stein’s 2020 novel, “Self Care,” was probably the best satire to date of the “Girlboss” moment, and I’d love to see a movie adaptation of that.)

The original Swimming With Sharks, written and directed by George Huang, was part of the wave of post-The Player showbiz satires that arrived throughout the ’90s. It was better than most, and Huang was supposedly inspired by his previous work as a Hollywood assistant, with Spacey’s Buddy Ackerman character allegedly based on Scott Rudin. Rudin’s brutish office behavior was well-known for decades but was finally the subject of an expose in the spring of 2021. 

The new version stars Diane Kruger as the studio boss and Kiernan Shipka- Sally from Mad Men– as the assistant. It depicts a ruthless world of Hollywood backstabbing and treachery, most grossly in a subplot in which Kruger’s dying mentor (Donald Sutherland) pulls the strings by sexually blackmailing her. 

It is sort of distracting how much Kruger and Shipka look alike, especially in the many scenes in which they’re both wearing white. 

Swimming With Sharks took something of an unconventional path to the small screen. It was created by Kathleen Robertson, the former actress best known for a part in the later years of Beverly Hills 90210. The show was originally slated for Quibi, the short-form streaming service that launched in 2020 and collapsed, in major embarrassment, just a few months later. 

Roku acquired Quibi’s intellectual property, including a couple of dozen shows, and Swimming With Sharks was among them. It’s clear that the version that’s arriving is better than the one where the episodes were going to be eight minutes long, and only available on phones. 

• Stephen Silver