‘Daisy Jones & the Six’ Review: Between Rock & A Soft Place

The Amazon mini-series about the rise and fall of a 1970s band mixes music, nostalgia, romance and a heavy dose of soap opera, writes Mike Hale.

The Amazon Prime Video miniseries Daisy Jones & the Six has been positioned as the first big-fun hit of the year, a glossy and nostalgic pop-music drama in the vein of Almost Famous based in part on the stormy history of Fleetwood Mac.

It’s big, all right, but most of the fun seems to have been lost in the mix — someone dialled down the romance and escapism and slid up the knob labelled “solemn tear-jerker.” You’re expecting Rhiannon, but what comes out of the speakers is more like MacArthur Park.

Daisy Jones & the Six doesn’t really work as pure nostalgia, either, despite the jukebox soundtrack (kudos for Too Late to Turn Back Now) and the exhaustive fetishisation of the early 1970s Los Angeles scene: the Troubadour, Filthy McNasty’s, cocaine, Hare Krishnas.

The retro sounds and evocative locations, real or re-created, are appealing in their own right, but they don’t summon the redolent Sunset Strip-and-Laurel Canyon vibe that they’re supposed to; the flavour is artificial, like rock ‘n’ roll surimi.

The series is based on a bestselling page-turner of the same title by Taylor Jenkins Reid, who was born in the 1980s, the decade after the story takes place.

It was developed for television by the talented writing team of Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, and five of its 10 episodes were directed by James Ponsoldt, all of whom were babies during the time when Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours — the analogue for the breakout album by the show’s fictional band — was saturating the American consciousness.

Their lack of direct experience with the period might have something to do with the show’s impulses feeling more curatorial and fannish than dramatic. (In contemporary style, the show is full of references and in-jokes, some accessible even to a viewer who was old enough to buy Rumours. The line “I love us” echoes a greeting card written by the hero of 500 Days of Summer. In some scenes, a main character is made up and dressed to resemble Phoebe Bridgers, one of the composers of the show’s original songs. The appearance of a cub reporter for Rolling Stone pays homage to Almost Famous.)

So, it’s disappointing that Daisy Jones mostly falls back on rock ‘n’ roll cliches and shameless melodrama, although it’s not necessarily surprising given that Neustadter and Weber were also responsible for The Fault in Our Stars. And perhaps they weren’t prepared to deal with the inherent bloat of the streaming drama, which is on dire display in the 10-episode Daisy Jones.

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Echoing the novel’s oral-history format, the series is framed as the reminiscences of the characters while they’re being interviewed years later for a documentary; when the show settles into a dull cycle of drugs-and-sex-fueled bad behavior and recrimination, it feels like nothing so much as a 7 1/2-hour episode of Behind the Music.

Daisy (Riley Keough), the wild child at the centre of the story, writes endless lyrics in a teenager’s notebook, goes in for billowy outfits and likes to hop around in circles onstage; she’s the Stevie Nicks stand-in. She eventually joins the Six, which includes Karen (Suki Waterhouse), a British keyboardist involved with another band member; Karen is a Christine McVie proxy, reinforcing the Fleetwood Mac connection.

The men in the band are nothing like the British blues veterans of the Mac, however. In classic rock-movie style, they’re a group of Pittsburgh high school friends, a callow and, despite the show’s sheen of decadence, very clean-cut bunch led by dreamy and tortured Billy (Sam Claflin).

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Daisy Jones has a lot of plot, as the band and Daisy go through the usual struggles while finding each other, becoming sensations and falling apart. But despite the show’s length, everything seems compressed, as if to make more time for windy, fake-poetic self-actualisation. (“Let’s be broken together.” “I don’t want to be broken.”)

Daisy’s insecurities are repeatedly blamed on her parents, but our evidence for that is one fleeting, risible scene of her gorgon mother telling her she has no talent. We’re told in passing that Billy hasn’t seen his father in years; when Dad happens to be at one of the band’s gigs, Billy walks up and almost immediately punches him.

Although much of what we see on screen portrays music being made (the assembly-line rockers and ballads were reportedly written by Bridgers, Jackson Browne, Blake Mills and Marcus Mumford), the dramatic heart of the series is the love-hate pairing of the domineering Billy, who sees the band as his fief, and the obstinate, unstoppable Daisy, who wins over the other band members and pushes them all to success. But their relationship, as portrayed, is kind of a drag, and both characters are unlikable in ways that are supposed to lend authenticity but mainly just make it hard to care about them.

Keough is able, for long stretches, to overcome the script’s banalities; she gets Daisy’s mix of swagger covering for uncertainty, and she gives her a prickly, genuine personality.

And there is one episode, written by Neustadter, in which the Daisy-Billy collaboration comes alive. Sent away to write songs because no one else can stand to have them around, they slowly figure out how to work together, and the show’s theme — the battle of wills between two talented and controlling people who are devoted to their music — clicks into focus.

But the soap opera of excess, addiction and star-crossed romance quickly reasserts itself, and we aren’t given a whole lot to hold on to besides Keough’s performance.

Timothy Olyphant provides notes of humour as the band’s weary road manager, and Nabiyah Be, as Simone, a friend of Daisy’s who finds a career in disco, is the rare cast member who makes her character seem like someone who might have actually been around in the 70s.

Simone is at the centre of one the show’s lowest points, an extended sequence in which Daisy flees to Greece and marries a European aristocrat, who appears to be introduced solely so he can push Daisy over the brink of addiction (from which she can be rescued by her fellow well-meaning Americans).

It’s just another instance of the series’s reliance on hoary Hollywood cliches — as Billy puts it, in a line that’s more true than it’s meant to be: “Same old rock ‘n’ roll story. The drinking, the drugs, the loneliness.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Mike Hale

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