RUTHLESS, TOOTHLESS (SWIMMING WITH SHARKS, SEASON ONE)

Long before it became very predictable schtick for him, Kevin Spacey played a horrible boss in an indie flick about Hollywood.

George Huang's low budget 1994 satire 'Swimming With Sharks' saw Spacey's studio executive Buddy Ackerman tormenting Frank Whaley's assistant Guy in a film that developed a cult following after it failed to initially set the box office alight.

Trading on Harvey Weinstein style ferocity Spacey's depiction of Ackerman was so nasty, it led to his performance being nominated in 2003 for the American Film Institute's '100 Years.. 100 Heroes and Villains'.

It also spawned a theatre production in 2007 on London's West End with Christian Slater as Ackerman and Matt Smith as Guy, with Damian Bichir also taking on the role of the monstrous movie mogul in a 2012 stage adaptation in Mexico City.

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Now Roku has launched a TV version after acquiring programmes from the Quibi streaming service before it went under in 2021.

But rather than replicate the original, the creators of 'Swimming with Sharks' have taken the original concept and given it several twists.

Now branded as a Roku Channel original, Kathleen Robertson's six part Quibi commissioned series gives Huang's film a female twist.

It casts Diane Kruger as a high flying studio CEO with a fierce reputation and Kiernan Shipka as a young assistant prepared to do whatever it takes while climbing Hollywood's greasy pole.

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The power balance between Kruger and Shipka's characters is not as weighted in favour of the studio boss as you might expect.

Unlike the 1994 film, the assistant Lou Simms is every bit as ruthless as the executive Joyce Holt - possibly even more.

When Lou arrives as an intern in Holt's office at Fountain Studios, she is left under no illusions where she sits on the Hollywood food chain.

Thomas Decker's bitchy assistant Travis takes an instant dislike to Lou who on her first day bonds with Finn Jones' sharp suited, charming studio vice president Marty.

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Joyce, meanwhile, is kept pretty much at a distance from the interns, as Travis and his fellow assistant Ross Butler's Alex tend to her everyday needs.

Under pressure from the studio's sleazy, ailing chairman, Donald Sutherland's Redmond over her investment plans, Joyce tasks Travis and Alex to help her land the film rights to Erika Alexander's Meredith Lockhart's acclaimed 'The Wanderlust Chronicles'.

Lou, however, takes matters into her own hands, seducing Lockhart in the ladies toilets in a bar and securing the rights.

In the meantime, Travis fires Lou but then rather humiliatingly has to walk back on his decision after Joyce is commended by Meredith Lockhart for sending the intern her way.

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Lou appears to befriend Alex but when he drowns in a swimming pool accident after an apparent drugs overdose, the intern is promoted - much to Travis' chagrin.

This enables Lou to inveigle her way into the lives of Joyce and her artist husband, Gerardo Celasco's Miles.

But with Travis suspecting Lou may have had a hand in Alex's death, will he be able to thwart her rise up the studio ladder?

And why does Lou have a shrine to Joyce in her bedroom?

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Adapted for television by Robertson and directed by Tucker Gates, each episode of 'Swimming with Sharks' lasts around 30 minutes.

It ought to be taut and snappy.

So why does it all feel so unsubstantial and dissatisfying?

The biggest problem is Robertson's scripts which all too easily veer into soap opera sensationalism and are at times teeth grindingly dull.

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Lou's monstrous behaviour competes with Redmond's equally appalling behaviour.

We discover he was a Harvey Weinstein style sexual predator and tormentor of Joyce when she was rising through the studio ranks.

In one sequence, when Joyce visits him supposedly on his death bed, old habits die hard and he demands a sexual favour.

And despite the novel twists of having two female leads in a studio drama and making the intern monstrous, it feels too much like a weird fusion of 'Single White Female' and 'Dynasty'.

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Kruger never really engages our sympathies in the way she should as Holt, as she mopes about the place wondering when Redmond is going to die, how the studio is going to film 'The Wanderlust Chronicles' and when she will be able to conceive a child.

She is actually upstaged by Shipka who has the meatier role but who is also saddled with some toe curlingly bad, supposedly edgy, bad girl antics like inviting a young man on Tumblr over to Joyce's beachside retreat so her boss can watch them have sex.

Sutherland arguably gets the rawest end of the deal, with a role that requires him to repeatedly scrape the barrel in the "being the bastard" stakes.

Decker camps it up to the nineties as a bitchy gay man, while Jones wanders about like a walking, talking mannequin in a Boss store - giving off Jude Law vibes but with nothing particularly interesting to say or do.

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Celasco, Alexander and Butler are also handed parts with little or no spark, while director Tucker Gates makes heavy weather of this rather turgid material.

Rather predictably, 'Swimming With Sharks' ends with Lou perched on the H of the Hollywood sign overlooking LA.

It is an oddly appropriate ending to Robertson and Gates' smug and shallow series which thinks it is smarter and more groundbreaking than it actually is and which all too easily resorts to histrionics.

There's nothing in 'Swimming With Sharks' to justify a second series.

This shark is toothless.

('Swimming With Sharks' was made available for streaming on the Roku Channel on April 15, 2022)