Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Offer’ on Paramount+, A Bloated Miniseries Detailing the Making of ‘The Godfather’

Hollywood self-indulgence reaches new heights with The Offer, a 10-part miniseries about the making of The Godfather, on Paramount+. Yep, 10 episodes. The story finds its point-of-view in Al Ruddy, the newbie producer who used his clout as the creator of TV’s Hogan’s Heroes to get his foot in the filmmaking door at Paramount, where he worked doggedly to get The Godfather off the ground. The rest is history, fictionalized for maximum entertainment here, led by star Miles Teller and a sprawling cast that includes Matthew Goode, Juno Temple and Dan Fogler. Fascinating? Or just masturbatory bloat? Let’s watch the first episode and find out.

THE OFFER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Crane shot: Zoom in on a street parade in Little Italy, New York City.

The Gist: There’s Joey Columbo (Giovanni Ribisi), an NYC mob capo, meeting with some compatriots over piles of macaroni and gravy in a restaurant. And there’s famed movie producer Robert Evans (Goode), parking his sports car on the Paramount lot and dropping names like Eastwood and Neil Simon. And there’s Al Ruddy (Teller), bored as hell as a shirt-and-tie-and-name-badge guy in an office job; he goes out to a bar and spies Evans across the room, holding court. And there’s Mario Puzo (Patrick Gallo), lamenting the flaccid turnout for his latest book signing, then getting roughed up in an alleyway because he’s in for a grand to a bookie; his next book better be better. It’s 1960-whatever or so.

We learn that Ruddy has a dream of making movies – the cinema is where people come together to gasp at the ending of Planet of the Apes. He scores a pitch meeting at CBS and lands Hogan’s Heroes with minimal effort. It ain’t what he wants, but it’s a start. Speaking of not doing what he wants, Puzo finally finds his balls and writes something people wanna read – a Noo Yawk gangster saga. He grew up around dose guys and knows it’ll ruffle feathers but before you know it, the episode has zoomed ahead to a time when people are lined up to get their copies of The Godfather autographed and Ruddy’s bored with sitcoms and finds Evans on the Paramount lot and talks his way into a job and gets help from a well-connected secretary named Bettye McCart (Temple). This thing moves fast. If it keeps up like this, Brando will be stuffing his mouth with cotton and Oscars will be handed out before you’re even done with that cup of coffee in your hand.

But this is only the first half of the first hour of this series. There’s so, so much more narrative in which to luxuriate. Joey Columbo sits in a restaurant men’s room with a pistol and reminds us of a certain scene in a certain movie, whatever could it be. Ruddy successfully recruits Robert Redford for a movie but it flops, so Evans hands him a low-priority project, The Godfather. Ruddy gets Puzo to write the script and when Puzo meets his idol Frank Sinatra in a restaurant, they get in a fight because Puzo once wrote a story about a singer who was a shitty human being. Puzo struggles at the typewriter so Ruddy flies to San Francisco and gets Francis Ford Coppola (Fogler) to help write the thing, and then direct it. There are more Joey Columbo gangster wranglings, which must be going somewhere, because the parting shot (see below!) is exactly that, an actual shot with a gun.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Feud comes to mind, the infinitely better series in which Jessica Lange plays Joan Crawford and Susan Sarandon plays Bette Davis, and they go at it before, during and after the making of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?.

Our Take: The first episode of The Offer is slick, colorful, overstated, light on its feet and reasonably entertaining. But even the first hour feels like too much, making it hard to imagine the series sustaining itself for nine more. It situates Ruddy as an unflappable, no-nonsense type supported by the whip-smart McCart, and surrounded by flakes, ranging from Puzo the slob to Evans the grinning partyguy to severe Paramount head Charles Bluhdorn (a perfectly cast Burn Gorman) to humorless Paramount beancounter Barry Lapidus (Colin Hanks), who isn’t conventionally flaky, but would rather sell off the Godfather rights for a modest profit than take a risk, which automatically retroactively makes him a gigantic f—ing idiot.

Series writer and creator Michael Tolkin covered similar behind-the-scenes material when he wrote the Robert Altman-directed Hollywood satire The Player, a classic black comedy about a studio executive who kills a man and then gets a movie made about a studio executive who kills a man. Man, that’s a great movie. The Offer – titled after a famous movie line, whatever could it be – is less self-aware but much, much sillier, amplified to bigger-than-life dramatics that feel like dramatic shorthand. Sure, none of us were there, no-bullshitting Robert Redford or whatever, but could it have unfolded like this? Probably not, which makes a true story feel like a phony one. It remains to be seen if the people who play Pacino or Brando or Diane Keaton or James Caan or Henry Kissinger or Raquel Welch or or or, etc. etc. etc., can elevate the proceedings to something resembling real life, or if it continues on this indulgent track. The latter seems likely, and I don’t think we should continue enabling this type of behavior.

Sex and Skin: None so far.

Parting Shot: A gangster levels his shotgun and blasts the back window out of Ruddy’s car.

Sleeper Star: At this point, Fogler, playing the great director Coppola, finds the tonal sweet spot between bigger-than-life caricature and believable character much better than other cast members playing recognizable figures, who tend to go big and broad and employ over-the-top gestures.

Most Pilot-y Line: Puzo’s wife Erika (Victoria Kelleher) gets the ball rolling to get the debt monkey off their backs, and inadvertently inspires capital-H History: “F— art, Mario. Start typin’.”

Our Call: SKIP IT. The opening salvo of The Offer fails to convince us that 10 hours of a “true” Hollywood making-of story is worth sitting through. Haven’t we seen enough of this back-patting, inside-joke stuff lately? Rewatch The Player instead. Oh, and The Godfather, too.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.