You can’t reasonably blame an adaptation of a copycat for the lack of originality. It’s worth saying, that “Daisy Jones and the Six” is at least explicitly derivative. The Prime Video series premiering Friday about the rise and fall of a fictional ’70s rock band has all kinds of comparisons: If the obvious reference point is “Almost Famous,” the chemistry and dysfunction between the main characters are “too much.” A Star is Born”. ,” while the made-up band might as well be called Meatwood Flack. Even the music – written by Blake Mills with assistance from the likes of Phoebe Bridgers, Chris Weissman, and Marcus Mumford, to name a few — set out to produce something that could have blown minds back because it borrowed heavily from the stuff.
Based on Taylor Jenkins Reed’s best-selling 2019 novel of the same name, the show’s premise is familiar: a band from Pittsburgh called the Dunne Brothers, composed of frontman Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) and his brother Graham (Will Harrison ) is named after. Six when a good keyboardist (Suki Waterhouse’s Karen) joins in. They gain a following, but it’s only after the arrival of Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) – a glamorous and eccentric fixture of the Los Angeles music scene who won’t settle for being a muse but has mastered writing her own songs. Not – that they achieve superstardom.
Things go awry when Daisy and Billy begin writing and performing together. She adds complexity and despair to his wife’s songs, and he brings discipline and structure to his songs. The pair hate each other, sexually. But they also connect because they are brilliant egoists who share core qualities that lead them down different paths: Billy, an ex-addict, sees Daisy’s erratic behavior as a byproduct of desperate self-medication. which he fully understands. She instead sees the aspirational tension of his self-perception as calm and loyal. They prick each other with needles. He’s patronizing, and she constantly sends Mandy back in her happy songs about love and home.
It’s a spicy setup, even if the clichés that traffic in it are obvious: repression versus honesty, hedonism versus restraint. The rock star’s wife (Camila Morrone as Camilla) should be the obvious loser here, a stoic enforcer of bourgeois social norms who competes against a truth-speaking idolater. It’s to Morone’s credit (and to the show) that he navigates the role through genre conventions that typically stamp him as a doormat or killjoy. He’s a credible contender, and the upcoming melodrama is fun to watch.
The unexpectedly complex and restrained dynamics of this love triangle are what the show handles best, even though it’s over 10 episodes. Keo plays Daisy as assertive but open, with a masterful combination of take-no-prisoners wildness and stochastic, captivating warmth.
But what, beyond a juicy love story, do we want from a reverse-engineered nostalgia piece about a ’70s band? Should there be something raw and real about how this decade felt? Create great music free from modern sensibilities? Ironized forms – such as oral history or rockumentary – that have become ossified? Explore the intersection of trust and regret. My rock history for insights we can only really appreciate now, 50 years after the fact?
The music is really fun, but on most of these fronts, “Daisy Jones and the Six” fails. The politics of that era have been surgically removed, the dialogue feels contemporary enough, and a subplot featuring Daisy’s best friend Simone’s (Nabiah Bay) queer love and adventures at a disco is sincerely felt. Most actors don’t quite capture what youth stardom looks or feels like, a little too old to play youth culture avatars and a little too young to retrospectively sell older versions of themselves. If Sam Claflin is soulful and charismatic as Billy, it’s because he looks like he’s alive. And they sizzle when she and Keough sing together — which is the main reason to watch it — Keough doesn’t control the stage or the spotlight all on his own. The series describes Daisy’s effect on the audience without fully producing it.
The same is true of its formal uses. “Daisy Jones and the Six” announces itself as a documentary but then inexplicably forgets about its framing device for a long period of time. So it sacrifices both the grainy thrill of “archival” footage that someone’s got in the basement (or whatever) and the fun workaround mockumentary to show us intimate moments sometimes unlikely to be caught on camera. Let’s take support. The show’s shortcuts are devious: we see scenes that a third party could not possibly see and fast forward.
“Daisy Jones and the Six” also forget one of the main advantages of oral history (which the novel uses to good effect), namely, that inconsistencies in people’s accounts cast productive doubt about what really happened. can generate. Not so in this series: the consensus among the principals is surprisingly strong, the mindless omniscience of the camera confirms that things happened that way, and the talking heads simply re-narrate (complicated or deeply instead of doing) what you just saw. The viewer feels utterly indebted to Eddie, the band’s disgruntled bassist Josh Whitehouse, whose resentment means he’s occasionally a bit aloof.
All of this speaks to a somewhat puzzling allocation of resources. Showrunners Scott Neustadter and Will Graham invested vast sums in some sort of historical “verity,” for example, carefully recreating the legendary Sunset Strip bar Filthy McNasty in the actual present-day Viper Room. But little effort went into aging the band members (Old Daisy’s hair is a touch straighter) and even less went into the significant work of writing them as old. The impression that these are just people wearing wigs is only reinforced by their reluctance to consider their choices. While the book’s older Daisy is forthright, detailed, and self-flagellant—outspoken about her ugly intentions at specific moments, honest about how out of control she was—Keough portrays her as tight-lipped and self-preservation. Plays in If Billy’s younger brother Graham is candid about his issues with his genius, cocky brother in the novel, the show’s Graham is gentle and unsociable. (Harrison deserves particular praise, therefore, for bucking the overall trend; despite having little material to work with, his Graham is one of the only characters who appears to be young and middle-aged.) Are.)
That said, the most candid and reflective participants in the documentary are Claflin’s Billy and Morrone’s Camilla – a payoff for the anemic framing device. What makes it all strange is that a show obsessed with certain formal challenges — specifically, recreating the feel and sound of a particular period and genre — mostly ignores the constraints of its own genre.