Trina Vega takes a substitute teaching job and starts looking for someone who can get her work. The students at her old performing arts school might have useful connections, and there’s a showcase coming up with a perfectly serviceable stage. For a struggling actress, these are attractive employee benefits.
Daniella Monet returns to the role in Hollywood Arts, the Victorious sequel that fills the vacancy left by retiring teacher Sikowitz with someone whose chief qualification is enthusiasm for being watched. Principal Helen’s staffing problem has become Trina’s audition.
Then Trina hears Emmy sing, and the showcase acquires a different purpose. The student everyone calls Techie has been handling backstage responsibilities while keeping her own ability quiet. Trina gives her the performing opportunity she wanted for herself. It’s an effective early turn because the script leaves some vanity attached: discovering a talented student is another achievement Trina can claim. Monet can keep the enormous confidence and self-dramatizing behavior while giving them a useful destination. Trina has found a way to help that still permits her to take credit. Baby steps. Loud ones.
The relationship gives the series an emotional footing that its callbacks cannot supply. Emmy, played by Alyssa Miles, has organized much of her school life around supporting her actor brother Oscar. Trina knows something about being the less celebrated sibling, with younger sister Tori now a successful pop star.
Their connection gives her interest in Emmy a personal cause, even when her methods remain questionable. Making Trina a teacher also changes the function of her professional disappointment. Experience getting overlooked can help her recognize an overlooked student; she doesn’t need to become a gifted performer for that experience to count.
The comedy benefits from similarly clear motives. Qwest, a musician hiding his arts education from his father behind a story about school sports, recruits Oscar to impersonate a coach. Here the performing arts premise earns its keep. Acting becomes a practical skill deployed in the service of an extremely impractical lie.
Peyton Jackson gives Qwest enough charm to make his predicament worth following, while Martin Kamm’s Oscar gets a role that puts his theatrical confidence to work. The two characters need each other for the situation to function. There’s a proper comic bargain underneath the silliness: help me conceal my acting school by doing some acting.
Emmy Liu-Wang brings an equally welcome commitment to Pepper’s physical comedy. At the Renaissance Faire, she’s buried in old-witch makeup and sneezing on people, giving the character a specific way to disrupt a scene. The gag is hardly delicate, but Liu-Wang plays the behavior with enough conviction to keep Pepper from feeling like someone waiting for permission to be quirky. Between Jackson’s predicament, Kamm’s impersonation, and Liu-Wang’s willingness to look ridiculous, the young cast demonstrates how much a concrete task can do for a broad sitcom personality.
Oscar becomes less useful when the script repeatedly assigns him the task of resenting Emmy. Her recognition threatens his accustomed status, and even her developing relationship with Matty gets processed as an episode in Oscar’s life. He assumes Matty’s interest in his sister is revenge for their rivalry.
That’s a good expression of self-absorption: romance has apparently been invented to inconvenience him. Repetition wears down the joke, though. Each new opportunity for Emmy risks becoming another occasion to manage her brother’s response, leaving the student discovering her abilities stuck doing emotional support work for the student who already knows he’s wonderful.
Trina advising Emmy to keep her theatre plans secret from Oscar makes that imbalance particularly noticeable. Concealment can generate an entertaining plot, as Qwest’s predicament demonstrates, but here it also lets Oscar’s possessiveness set the conditions of Emmy’s progress.
Miles’s quieter presence provides a necessary resting place among the bigger personalities; she doesn’t need to compete with every flailing reaction to hold a scene. The writing does need to let her decisions carry weight beyond their effect on her brother. Pepper and Jen Z’s competition for Oscar’s attention compounds the problem. Another round of jealousy offers limited room for either girl to surprise us.
Music should provide an escape from those recurring arrangements. Emmy’s showcase appearance works because singing changes how another character sees her and prompts Trina to make a choice. Elsewhere, the brief original pop songs and covers, including “Pink Pony Club,” can feel like opportunities to confirm that the cast can sing before returning to familiar business.
The voices are capable, with Liu-Wang particularly impressive, yet the short originals leave little space for a musical personality to develop. A performing arts comedy can reasonably pause to enjoy a performance. It becomes frustrating when the performance offers less character development than the argument waiting on the other side of it.
The Battle of the Bands story brings these competing impulses together. Emmy tries to reunite Trina with her former girl group, an appealing reversal in which the student takes an interest in her teacher’s unfinished ambitions. It gives the school’s musical activity a relationship to work on.
The former bandmates then turn up and mock Trina, restoring a familiar comic arrangement just as the series has found another use for her. Among the students, her embarrassing history can become experience she passes along. Among her peers, it remains ammunition. How much authority can this teacher acquire if every reunion sends her back to being the class joke?
Hollywood Arts premiered globally on Netflix on October 15, 2026, with planned subsequent broadcast windows on Nickelodeon and Paramount+. Serving as a sequel and spin-off to Victorious, the teen comedy series follows struggling, self-proclaimed icon Trina Vega as she returns to her former performing arts high school as an unqualified substitute teacher, attempting to inspire and guide a vibrant new generation of eccentric students.
Where to Watch Hollywood Arts Online
Full Credits
Title: Hollywood Arts
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: October 15, 2026
Rating: TV-PG
Running time: 22–25 minutes per episode
Director: Jonathan Judge, Wendy Faraone, Kira Kosarin, Nathan Kress
Writers: Jake Farrow, Samantha Martin, Hannah Suria, Joe Sullivan, Sam Becker, Mariah Smith
Producers and Executive Producers: Daniella Monet, Jake Farrow, Samantha Martin
Cast: Daniella Monet, Yvette Nicole Brown, Alyssa Miles, Emmy Liu-Wang, Peyton Jackson, Erika Swayze, Martin Kamm, Eric Lange, Matt Bennett
The Review
Hollywood Arts
Trina’s unlikely teaching career gives Hollywood Arts warmth, and the young ensemble makes good use of disguises, deception, and physical comedy. Repeated jealousy plots give those performers less room to grow, while brief songs often display talent without developing character. Monet’s vain, increasingly useful mentor deserves the new responsibilities. The scripts could trust her to keep them.
PROS
- Trina and Emmy’s well-grounded mentorship.
- Qwest and Oscar’s effective comic partnership.
- Pepper’s committed physical comedy.
CONS
- Jealousy repeatedly stalls character development.
- Brief original songs offer limited dramatic development.
- Familiar humiliation undercuts Trina’s changing role.
