Daisy Jones & the Six review: glossy Amazon drama about a 1970s rock band

Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2019 bestseller Daisy Jones & the Six was about the “exuberant rise and chaotic fall“ of a 1970s band that seemed to be based on Fleetwood Mac, said Lucy Mangan in The Guardian. The novel felt “made for television”; the rights were “duly snapped up” and it has now been turned into a glossy ten-part series for Amazon Prime.

Riley Keough plays Daisy Jones, a “charismatic singer-songwriter” who joins a band from Pittsburgh made up of childhood friends. They begin playing in “dingy clubs”, and learn to navigate the treacherous waters of the music industry. The series has “the style and glamour” of the book – “everyone and everything in it looks ceaselessly gorgeous”, and it’s fun to watch. But it feels a bit flat, because you don’t really care about the characters.

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The series’s big problem, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times, is that it is “not cool. Not nearly.” It offers up “those eternal rock’n’roll handmaidens of drugs and nasty sex”, but it just feels like “cosplay”. Somewhere along the way, the story has lost its “dirty soul”, and the result is a “pastiche that doesn’t understand the thing it is pastiching”.

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It didn’t work for me either, said Lili Loofbourow in The Washington Post. “The music really is fun”, but “the politics of the period are surgically stripped out, the dialogue feels quite contemporary”, and the actors fail to capture what young stardom is like. It tries hard to portray a vibe, but it doesn’t feel it.

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