I am anxious—for better and worse—to see how the rest of this limited series plays out. Olivier Assayas’s original masterpiece prides itself on balancing nuance with bluntness as it tackles the contemporary state of film in the 90s. No fault of Assayas—whose choice to remake his film offers this series its most meta element—for wanting to revisit common themes for a landscape that has grown more commercialized and content-oriented, but in its commentary on the state of the industry, this so far feels more in line with Birdman than it does with, well, Irma Vep. Too eager to spell out its commentary; too eager to spell out character motivations and issues; cheap shots at the mass entertainment complex (to be fair, also the weakness of Irma Vep’s spiritual relative, Clouds of Sils Maria); a clever concept that already seems to stretch thin in just one hour. But this is just one episode, and there is a lot of promise with how Assayas writes each of his characters and explores certain dynamics among them. Alicia Vikander is predictably great, and it will be worth continuing this journey for her character alone. (But I’ll tell you one thing; if at no point she dances along to Sonic Youth, this miniseries will already be inferior by general principle.)