You don’t need to have read the Encyclopaedia of Rock from cover to cover to recognise the influences behind Daisy Jones & The Six. Its story of a 1970s band’s meteoric rise and dramatic downfall amid a tangled mess of relationship dynamics is the story of Fleetwood Mac, most obviously, but it’s also that of The Beatles and any other band that people cared enough about to follow its members’ personal lives like a soap opera.
This Forrest Gumpish sense of historical familiarity is a big part of its appeal, of course, as is its old-fashioned start-at-the-beginning storytelling. The year is 1967 and in Pittsburgh, a group of unpopular youths are making a racket in a suburban garage, while on the other side of the country, a young woman is sneaking into a Byrds gig and writing songs with the same disregard for conventional chord structure as Joni Mitchell. Unlikely though it might seem, they are on a collision course to becoming one of the biggest bands in the world.
Daisy Jones & The Six (Prime Video). Photo / Supplied
With the charismatic Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) as their frontman, the unimaginatively named Dunne Brothers hone their craft belting out equally unimaginative blues rock at proms, graduations and sweet 16s. Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) has her best song stolen by her pretentious hack boyfriend who passes it off as his own.
These early trials and tribulations are interspersed with VH1 Behind the Music-style talking heads from the band members circa 1997, two decades after their acrimonious split. At one point, one of them reflects: “What a time to be alive if you loved music,” which should really be a station ID on Coast FM if it isn’t already. If you can’t help but agree, this might just be the show for you.
We Are Not Alone (TVNZ+)
As the 1990s’ biggest sitcoms are brought back to life one by one, the absence of a Third Rock from the Sun reboot grows more and more conspicuous. But maybe we don’t need one after all – there’s a new comedy about aliens trying to assimilate to life on this wildly confusing earth, and this time it’s British. The Gu’un alien cohort that claims control of the UK includes the deadpan master Vicki Pepperdine (Getting On, Camping), Mike Wozniak (Man Down) and Joe Thomas (The Inbetweeners), assisted by hapless council worker Stewart (Declan Baxter). It’s written by the people behind the beloved Ghosts and shares a lot of the same comedic DNA.
You don’t need to actually get married to wake up one day and find you’ve turned into an old married couple. That’s the story of Dylan Moran and Morgana Robinson’s characters’ lives in Stuck, a very short (5 x 15-minute episodes) and very funny new series written by Moran. It will come as no surprise to fans of the Black Books star that his character is a grumpy old misanthrope, which his 10-years-younger and infinitely more optimistic partner somehow manages to tolerate. True to life, it’s a show where nothing much really happens, but their rambling, slightly surreal conversations are worth it all on their own.
War of the Worlds (Neon)
Confusingly, two different War of the Worlds came out in 2019 – a three-part BBC adaptation that was generally considered a little bit so-so, and this French-British co-production, which has now run for three seasons, and could broadly be classified as “better than you might expect”.”- It certainly takes a more liberal approach to the adaptation than the BBC version – it’s more of a reimagining really – setting the action in modern-day UK and France, where aliens wipe out all but a few pockets of civilisation. One of the survivors is Daisy Edgar-Jones, of subsequent Normal People fame.
War of the Worlds (Neon). Photo / Supplied
Movie of the Week: Nope (Neon)
The latest movie from Jordan Peele (Get Out, Us) is also his most ambitious, and divisive – you either love it, or you just don’t get it. Get Out star Daniel Kaluuya returns alongside Keke Palmer as a horse-wrangling brother and sister trying to capture footage of a UFO that they suspect of messing with their electricity and disturbing their horses. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is clearly an influence, and the film is impressively Spielbergian in its scope. So even if you fall into the “don’t get it” category, at least it’s spectacular to look at.
From the Vault: The Client (1994) (Netflix)
For a few years in the mid-90s, director Joel Schumacher found a rare, perfect balance: on even years he’d do a deadly serious John Grisham adaptation and on odd years a deeply silly Batman movie. The first and best of this run, The Client is a no-nonsense legal thriller starring Tommy-Lee Jones as an attorney and Susan Sarandon as the lawyer of the late Brad Renfro, the 11-year-old witness and key to solving a mob murder case. One of the classic legal page-turners effectively translated into a two-hour blockbuster.
Podcast of the Week: Bot Love
When Joaquin Phoenix fell madly in love with his AI virtual assistant in the 2013 movie Her, it was widely accepted to be a work of fiction. Arriving into a world that had only just heard of Siri and hadn’t yet met Alexa, it seemed like the kind of thing that might happen one day in the distant future, along with jetpacks and hoverboards and everything else the movies have promised us.
Flash forward 10 years and now we have a limited podcast series called Bot Love (part of the Radiotopia Presents feed) about people who are in love with an AI. And the surprising thing about it isn’t that it’s happening, but how low the bar is for people to fall in love with a computer program. These aren’t super-advanced clever AIs – they’re basically just the bog standard ones that try to talk to you when you’re doing your online banking.
What sort of person falls in love with a bot that’s only barely more advanced than the predictive text on their phone? In short, a lonely one, and hearing their stories it’s hard to judge them for that. These are bittersweet love stories but they’re love stories all the same.
