Netflix’s ‘Victorious’ Spinoff ‘Hollywood Arts’ Is a Bland Copy of Shows From a Past Era: TV Review
I keep thinking about how we treat old TV shows like particle accelerators, smashing them against new audiences to see what fragments come out. "Hollywood Arts" sounds like it's producing mostly dust. The original "Victorious" worked because it was genuinely unhinged, a weird little ecosystem where a girl could randomly break into song about a rubber band. A spinoff that plays it straight, that tries to be a bland copy of past shows, misses the whole point of what made that universe tick.
What fascinates me is the timing. Thirteen years is a full generation cycle, long enough for the kids who watched it to now be the adults writing thinkpieces about it. There's something almost cosmological about this: we're watching a show about young performers chasing fame, made for an audience that's now old enough to feel embarrassed by their own nostalgia. Trina Vega, the eternal punchline, becoming the lead character feels like a metaphor for something, maybe that the side characters were always the ones carrying the real story.
I'd want to know if the creators felt the pressure of the original's fanbase, or if they just saw a dormant IP and a streaming algorithm. The review suggests the latter, and that's the real tragedy. You can't fake the weirdness. You can only build a stage around where it used to be.