The Get Down, a big-budget musical drama about the rise of hip-hop, starts this week on Netflix, with critics already calling it "fantastic and fresh" - so why are we only getting to see the first half?
Created by Stephen Adly Guirgis and Baz Luhrmann, the Australian director of Romeo + Juliet, Moulin Rouge! and The Great Gatsby, the series takes its title from the funky break on a record over which an MC could rap.
It is set during a period from 1977 to 1979, when New York's prolific and innovative music scene included punk, disco and the start of hip-hop.
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Featured stars include Justice Smith, Shameik Moore, Herizen Guardiola, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Jaden Smith, Giancarlo Esposito and Grandmaster Flash.
The Get Down is the second 1970s-set music-themed show to debut on Netflix this year, following HBO's flop Vinyl, says Alex Needham in The Guardian. But while Vinyl was "derided as a farrago of cliches", The Get Down, judging by its first episode, is "much more fun"
It combines painstaking research and a massive budget, all filtered through a distinctly lavish Luhrmann sensibility, continues Needham. But the music is key "and so much of it runs through the first episode that it is basically a musical".
[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"content_original","fid":"89288","attributes":{"class":"media-image"}}]] It's a diverse musical like we've never seen before, says Ben Travers on IndieWire, who calls The Get Down "an impassioned love story whipped into a frenzy by an even more fervid score". The series also delivers "a wholly unique and deeply compelling feat of television".
Beyond "sterling performances and an addictive soundtrack", Travers praises Lurhmann for taking an overexposed and misunderstood music genre and breaking it down to its component parts to create "a fantastic and fresh" blend - a "TV show told as a film, a music video told as a six-hour mini-series and an original story holding more truth than most true stories".
Your tolerance for Luhrmann might be the decisive factor in whether you like the 90-minute pilot, says Tim Goodman at the Hollywood Reporter. The Get Down is "a gigantic hot mess" from a director known for creating "flossy, epic fun", he says.
Goodman believes the show will be "divisive in its aesthetic choices - think West Side Story, not Spike Lee", but Luhrmann's "effervescent joie de vivre", rather than Lee's "grittiness", seems like a fresher approach.
The Get Down gains its footing once its creator's influence become less evident, the critic adds, and it has "a crazy a chance at becoming something really good".
It's messy but wonderful, says Sonia Saraiya in Variety. Sure, this tale of musicians searching for the methodology of finding, isolating and reproducing the get down might be a hackneyed metaphor for life, but "Luhrmann is a master of gussied-up shlock".
The critics says fans of the director's earlier films will recognise familiar beats in The Get Down, from "the cartoonish renderings of live-action drama to the lethally deployed pop music soundtrack". The result, she says, is "a beautiful mess, a flawed show interspersed with moments of remarkable brilliance".
The production saga has also been a mess, says Gazelle Emami on Vulture. This is Netflix's most expensive series to date, she points out, saying that at one point, Luhrmann became "so overwhelmed with the process" he considered leaving the show.
One result of the "production woes" has been the decision to split season one into two parts, she adds. It's unclear how long the first series will be in total, with the creators fighting about whether they're going to do 12 or 13 episodes.
The first six episodes will premiere on Friday 12 August, with the second half to come at an undetermined date in 2017.
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