Greg and Zanna watch a show about the 70s that probably should have stayed there.
SCORES
Watchability: 2
Originality: 1
Musicality: 0
Daisy Jones & the Six. Photo / Amazon Prime
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SHE SAW
Neither Greg nor I have read the bestselling book Daisy Jones & The Six but I have read a plot summary on bookrags.com, which is practically the same thing. Even without having read the book, I feel confident in saying that the television series adaptation isn’t as good as the book - and I think you’ll find millions of readers who will revel in saying the same thing.
It’s not that the series is bad. It’s just not very fresh. It’s such a stereotypical story of the rise and fall of a rock band, it seems like it could be true. You could argue that would make for good television but if I wanted to watch a documentary about a wildly successful 1970s band and their drug, sex and relationship issues, I’d watch one of the many about Fleetwood Mac.
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The book by Taylor Jenkins Reid is loosely inspired by the story of Fleetwood Mac and is written entirely in interview transcripts. The series therefore frames the show around a 1990s documentary uncovering the truth behind the never-before-told story of the band and why they broke up at the height of their success. It cuts between two timelines: the talking head interviews with the band members in the 90s and the story unfolding in the 70s told like a traditional drama.
At some stage during the documentary interviews, I started to contemplate the nature of acting. If the aim of good acting is to get as close to the way real people talk and behave as possible then performing documentary interviews is a true litmus test. You can feel the acting in these interview segments in a way that isn’t obvious in the drama portion. And this isn’t to say that any of the actors were weak - in fact Riley Keough is quite captivating, though perhaps not such a breathtaking singer as the part called for - but just that this format is incapable of creating authenticity because it’s incredibly difficult to say the lines of a script as if you’d just thought of them now. I can only think of an episode in the final season of Atlanta that achieved this and I suspect it wasn’t truly scripted.
Overall, it’s a watchable show albeit largely unoriginal. Because Greg generally dislikes everything, I expect his review will be about how bad this series is, but I’d like to quote him from part way through episode two and reveal to you, and possibly him as well, his true feelings towards Daisy Jones & the Six: “I’m quite enjoying this terrible series.” I concur.
HE SAW
The first thing you notice is the music, and the reason for that is because it’s terrible. I understand that the series is based on a book that was set in the same dismal era — the 1970s — but come on! Baz Luhrman set his movie version of Romeo and Juliet 500 years after the original, and filled it with 90s rock — which Shakespeare presumably would have hated - and it was awesome.
The 70s wasn’t entirely terrible – it had great funk, punk, soul and disco – but its most popular music was the droning white “rock” that dominates this show, which made it by far the worst and least interesting musical era in at least the past 70 years. The 50s had the excitement of the birth of rock ’n’ roll, the 60s had The Beatles, Stones and Monkees, the 80s featured the emergence of rap and party drug pop, the 90s had the excitement and anger of grunge, the 2000s was pre-conspiracy Kanye and the 2010s was all about Lorde and the rebirth of pop.
The abiding musical memory of the 70s is the droning meaninglessness of Stairway to Heaven and its best-known band was The Eagles. I’m sure the era holds nostalgia value for those who were coming of age and smoking a huge amount of drugs at the time, but otherwise? To deliberately base a musical television show in the 70s is an act so perverse it borders on trolling.
There were times when I would start getting lost in the drama, because I find musical rags-to-riches stories compelling, but then they’d play a song and everything would be ruined. All I could think was how powerful the show would have been if The Six were a grunge band that moved to Seattle in 1992, or a rap trio who’d arrived in New York in 1982 or a bunch of teens who’d formed a band in a working-class British town in 1960. Those stories would have had the power and excitement of the new, of a band making music that was both meaningful and a pleasure to listen to. Instead we have songs so grey and repetitive they become musical porridge.
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On top of that, the story is so cliched and unoriginal, one of the characters actually says: “It’s the same tired old rock ‘n’ roll tale.” Good point, guy. They should put that on the poster, along with a warning that too much 70s music may be hazardous to your mental health.
Daisy Jones & the Six is streaming now on Prime Video.
