Editors' Note

We should have known it was too good to last.

Last year at this time we were gloating over F. Scott Fitzgerald's presence in what has become known as "streaming television." For those of us who remember life before remote controls or even cable—back when rabbit ears were the norm—that means the increasingly diverse range of "platforms" that allow us through various gizmos and gadgets to waste more time watching television than at any previous point in human history. Even so, every once in a while, TV and literature intersect, and to our delight 2017 was shaping up to put the author of The Great Gatsby squarely in that cultural crossroads. Amazon. com was scheduled to produce not one but two shows on our writer, one a "bio-series" inspired by Therese Anne Fowler's 2013 bestseller Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald and the other a loose adaptation of The Last Tycoon (or, as we know it, The Love of the Last Tycoon). Only the pilot of each series was available by Fall 2016 as we composed our last Editors' Note, but both projects had been green-lighted for full seasons, and our expectations ran as high as our page count in the last issue.

To commemorate Fitzgerald's sudden visibility on the small screen, we commissioned assessments of these introductory episodes, a review of Z (with Christina Ricci in the title role) and a roundtable of scholars on Tycoon. We were pleasantly surprised by the results: we scholars can be notoriously possessive of our fields of expertise, and we had worried that our commentators might expose some inherent prejudice against these adaptations. Instead, the discussions were balanced and addressed not only the treatment of Fitzgerald's life and works but the narrative opportunities and constraints of the medium. It was exciting to see our colleagues demonstrate their knowledge both of literature and popular culture.

As the year progressed, we waited with baited breath for Amazon to release each show's slate of episodes. Z arrived first, in January, followed by Tycoon in late July. The first received mixed reviews from professional critics at major newspapers and magazines. The New York Times harrumphed about the "endless shots of one or both [Scott and Zelda] drinking from a bottle, imbibing in bathtubs and so on, navigating the party circuit in New York and elsewhere": "Watching the spectacle is like being stuck in a hipster party that never ends or stops wallowing in its self-indulgence and self-importance" (Genzlinger)—which is not all that different than what was said about the Fitzgeralds in the 1920s. As far as we could tell from monitoring the blogs and websites of amateur enthusiasts (and we do not mean amateur in a negative sense), Z attracted a loyal cadre of fans. Erika Robuck—whose own Fitzgerald-inspired novel, Call Me Zelda (2013), appeared the same year as Fowler's bestseller—offered generous testimony to the pleasures of the series:

I often had to pause the film to take in the visually stunning and artistic scene renderings. With just thirty minutes an episode, not a moment of dialogue, music, transition, wardrobe, or lighting is wasted. It is a testament to the production quality that even moments of lighthearted joy are shadowed with the foreknowledge of the ways Scott and Zelda will fall. It is especially moving when the young Fitzgeralds run to the ocean, hand-in-hand—their laughter trailing—not knowing how mercilessly the sun will scorch the Icarus-like, waxen wings of their youthful arrogance.

("Binge-worthy")

The question was whether enough viewers understood that this "youthful arrogance" would turn poignant in future seasons as the Fitzgeralds' lives fell apart—and whether general audiences had enough patience to wait out the "endless" imbibing for that tragedy.

In general, reviewers' reactions to The Last Tycoon did not suffer from the "Fitzgerald fatigue" that seemed to infect their responses to Z. After all, far fewer people have read the posthumous 1941 novel than know the Scott and Zelda story even in its broadest outlines. Even for those audiences who are familiar with the disconnected vignettes Edmund Wilson...