“A drama about the Sex Pistols should be a riot,” said Anita Singh in The Daily Telegraph. But Danny Boyle’s new six-part series (starring Anson Boon, Louis Partridge, Toby Wallace and Jacob Slater as the band’s classic line-up) is “so lacking in anarchic spirit that it may as well be a Coldplay biopic”.
Based on the memoir of guitarist Steve Jones, it ticks off “all the staging posts in the Sex Pistols story – first meeting with Malcolm McLaren, first gig, the infamous Bill Grundy interview, the jubilee boat trip”. And as a “visual accompaniment to a Wikipedia entry”, it would be “passable”, but it’s simply too “Disney-fied” to have the impact the Pistols’ story deserves.
It’s true that the famously unwashed punks are often shown “bathed in a soft, ethereal glow”, said Dan Einav in the FT. Good job then that the acting is “pitch-perfect”. Boon, in particular, brings “an electrifying volatility” to the role of John Lydon, while imbuing him with vulnerability. It’s in reframing the “self-proclaimed ‘fucked four’” as “lost children” that the series is subversive.
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
I spent the first ten minutes thinking Pistol was “dreadful”, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times. Mainly that was due to the dialogue. “It’s no good being like other bands, we gotta be like us!” says one of the Pistols. “Wot, four broke working-class kids who can’t play for shit?” comes the reply. My God, I thought, “Could this really be Danny Boyle?”
Still, something must have gone right, as I only planned on watching the first episode, yet “I was still on my sofa four hours later”.
-
6 well-crafted log homesFeature Featuring a floor-to-ceiling rock fireplace in Montana and a Tulikivi stove in New York
-
Film reviews: A House of Dynamite, After the Hunt, and It Was Just an AccidentFeature A nuclear missile bears down on a U.S. city, a sexual misconduct allegation rocks an elite university campus, and a victim of government terror pursues vengeance
-
Book reviews: ‘Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife’ and ‘Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix It’Feature Gertrude Stein’s untold story and Jane Leavy’s playbook on how to save baseball
-
Rachel Ruysch: Nature Into ArtFeature Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, through Dec. 7
-
Music reviews: Olivia Dean, Madi Diaz, and Hannah FrancesFeature “The Art of Loving,” “Fatal Optimist,” and “Nested in Tangles”
-
Gilbert King’s 6 favorite books about the search for justiceFeature The journalist recommends works by Bryan Stevenson, David Grann, and more
-
Ready for the apocalypseFeature As anxiety rises about the state of the world, the ranks of preppers are growing—and changing.
-
A little-visited Indian Ocean archipelagoThe Week Recommends The paradise of the Union of the Comoros features beautiful beaches, colourful coral reefs and lush forests
