Hitmakers Review 2025 Tv Show Series Cast Crew Online
It’s pretty indisputable that the most crucial part of the music industry — the songwriter — is the most overlooked and, in most cases, shortchanged. With the rising dominance of streaming over the past decade and the looming threat of AI to the art form, songwriters have faded even further into the background as royalty rates have remained shockingly low, and the chance of landing in the credits of a certified hit has diminished as music has favored a quantity market.
“Hitmakers,” Netflix‘s new unscripted reality series focusing on a dozen songwriters behind chart-toppers for Ariana Grande, Justin Bieber and BTS — and has no relation to Variety’s long-established music event and cover package of the same name — barely addresses that elephant in the studio across its six-episode arc. Instead, it plays as a glossy fantasy focusing on the glitzy side of the hit machine: songwriting camps, or luxury gatherings of proven hitmakers flown to exotic locales to come up with the next big smash. These camps, often funded by record labels or publishers, can center on a specific artist or be a general jam session. In real life, most songwriting camps are significantly less opulent. The writers don’t get paid upfront or receive a per diem — a major point of contention in the community — and work on contingency, hoping to secure a spot on tomorrow’s biggest song.
The show, streaming on Netflix today, manages to be revealing yet tone-deaf at the same time, using the tropes of splashy reality TV to convey the workmanlike, usually low-paying world of professional songwriting. It’s no wonder, as many of its executive producers worked on “Selling Sunset,” bringing that same fast-cut style to a new realm. (Harvey Mason Jr., CEO of the Recording Academy, is also an EP and well aware of the issues in the songwriting industry.) In the “Hitmakers” universe, writing is a glamorous lifestyle with private transportation and expensive accommodations — which it is, for only the one percent — while avoiding the actual reality of it.
For these writers, who share billions of streams and over a dozen Grammys between them, those realities are barely mentioned on “Hitmakers,” a well-intentioned and entertaining yet superficial look inside the hit factory. We see them popping bottles and eating gourmet dinners, jet-setting to Cabo and the Bahamas. Only one songwriter, Trey Campbell, manages to steer the show back to reality, explaining that despite credits on John Legend and Giveon songs, he still has to make ends meet by driving for Uber.
The music industry is all about perception, and “Hitmakers” largely depicts it as a non-stop, money-making party. That, somehow, is to its benefit. The challenge of capturing the magic of the songwriting process is that, much like with many creative vocations, it’s largely meticulous and mundane. MTV’s 2007 series “I’m From Rolling Stone” comes to mind as an early reality show that overestimated the extent to which writing is a social sport, pitting six summer interns against one another for a contributing editor position at the magazine.
Where “Hitmakers” succeeds is in turning the pressure cooker of songwriting into a compelling spectacle. Across the six episodes, the songwriters — Tommy Brown, Sevyn Streeter, Nova Wav, JHart, Jenna Andrews, Stephen Kirk, Harv, Ferras, Ben Johnson, Whitney Phillips and Campbell — split into three smaller groups, tasked with creating songs for Legend, Shaboozey and Blackpink’s Lisa. Each of the singers cameos to give an idea of what they’re looking for, and off the teams go to come up with an original song under a tight deadline.
It’s in these multi-million dollar studios where “Hitmakers” shines. Each writer has his or her own strengths, and it’s like watching athletes at the top of their game reach across genre lines to hatch kernels of ideas into full-blooded songs. “Hitmakers” intends to show the human side of songwriting, and the writers clearly love their craft. Their excitement and glimpses of brilliance radiate off the screen as a song’s puzzle pieces come together, with each group celebrating each other’s creations during listening sessions at the end of each episode.
“Hitmakers” skates by without playing up too much of the drama, even though there’s bound to be plenty with something as emotionally charged as songwriting. During the episodes, Andrews and Phillips clear the air about tensions that arose during a session; Brown pep-talks Campbell, who let emotions get the best of him while collaborating; Harv, Brown and Streeter confront Kirk about how he spoke to his wife, Andrews, during a dinner at their home in Nashville.
In one of the show’s most revealing moments, Johnson publicly challenges JHart after an idea discussed in their session emerges out of another, one where Johnson wasn’t present. Creative ownership is often a gray area in group songwriting sessions — countless lawsuits have spilled out of the studio about this very subject — yet rarely do we see resolutions met before they reach a point of legal contention. (In the end, JHart graciously offers Johnson publishing out of his personal share, a great reality show moment that rarely happens in reality.)
That’s about as real as it gets on “Hitmakers,” a show that skims the industry’s surface. At the end of the last episode, the writers gather in a backroom at BLVD, Brown’s Los Angeles steakhouse. He orders two caviars, two branzinos, three Wagyu meatballs and three steaks for the table. They share what success stories came out of the sessions: Legend loved “Cherry,” a plunky tune from the first episode; Lainey Wilson might cut “Happy Birthday,” written for Shaboozey; and Lisa is “supposedly, allegedly” going to record the swaggery “Eleven.”
They all raise their glasses in a toast: “Always up, never down,” says Brown. “Spread that money all around.” It’s a solid mantra for an industry that stiffs its lifeblood — the songwriter — far too often.
