The new Netflix show Hollywood had the perfect material for this rule to come into effect, a gay black writer writing a script to be directed by a half Filipino director, produced by a studio lead by a Jewish woman and a gay producer and a black actress and a gay actor competing for roles in 1940s Hollywood, with the topic of prostitution thrown into the mix - and then it dropped all that potential. Everything goes perfectly smooth, somehow everything is magically made possible, the black actress gets the main role, the writer, director, producer, studio boss, everyone just gets to do their job, and while I get the sentiment that it's amazing to see marginalized folks succeed - it does not make a great plot. In fact, it makes this story not only feel boring and overly polished, it also makes it feel unrealistic. A bunch of white studio executives just agreeing that of course the very talented black girl is the perfect cast for this major motion picture? I honest to god doubt that this would be realistic in 2020 Hollywood, let alone the 1940s. Now it is mentioned a lot that all these controversial choices the studio makes would cause trouble - characters discuss protests, murder threats, the KKK, people not getting any more work after coming out as gay, but nothing actually happens. Not only is this not a struggle or conflict, it also breaks the other very basic rule of writing, especially scriptwriting, "show, don't tell", and more importantly: It makes those very real problems that are imminent even now, 80 years later, seem like something marginalized people make up, they are shown as something people are afraid of but that are not actually real. That's what I'd call wasted potential because if all those issues were fleshed out more, this would have been an amazing and important story to tell. Additionally, because of the missing struggles, all of the characters become incredibly two-dimensional, which in itself is a waste of a very talented cast. What could have been a masterpiece has instead been a utopia, lovely to see, but hard to believe and harder to keep in mind. Personally I will easily forget this whole story in just a couple of days now, and I think that is sad.
Dear Netflix, you had gold in your hands here - I would love to see this rewritten as more than a beautiful but forgettable dream. Give me the harsh reality of 1940s Hollywood. Give me the harsh reality of a world where racism was even more imminent than nowadays, where homophobia was up another level, where sexism was a more profound issue than figuring out the details - don't give me a feelgood story that I couldn't ever believe no matter what decade it was set in. Give it a rewrite. Because the base material does deserve it. This can be done so much better.
