Daisy Jones & the Six: A 70s Rock ‘n’ Roll Soap Opera
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B-
Say hello again to bell-bottoms, sequins, paisley, porn ‘staches, swirly gowns, champagne and cocaine in Daisy Jones & the Six, a tale of the 1970s told in a sprawling new 10-part Amazon Studios series which follows the meteoric rise and sudden end to an imaginary chart-topping rock band.
At its centre, it’s propelled by the erotic and creative tension between two attractive singer-songwriters: Daisy Jones played by Riley Keough (American Honey, Zola) and the inconveniently married Billy Dunne, played by English actor Sam Chaftlin (The Hunger Games, Me Before You).
In a period of belt-tightening by streaming services, Daisy Jones & the Six is a conspicuously big-budget venture, with dozens of retro costume changes, 20-year time jumps, faux documentary interviews, multiple locations and stadium shows full of hundreds of extras.
The series, developed by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber (co-writers of the 2009 romcom 500 Days of Summer) with Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine company, was four years in development, with delays due to COVID. Simultaneous with the worldwide release on March 3, there’s an Atlantic Records album, entitled Aurora, performed by the cast and created by producer-songwriter Blake Mills, collaborating with, among others, Jackson Brown, Phoebe Bridgers, and Marcus Mumford.
The source material is a million-selling 2019 novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, a fictional oral history of a hugely popular Anglo-American 70-era band of men and women whose musical career was complicated by fame, lust, booze and drugs.
The obvious model is Fleetwood Mac, the “adult rock” band who put the FM in FM Radio in the late-70 and whose chaotic personal lives during the creation of their hit album Rumours were routinely compared to a soap opera, including by members Stevie Nicks and Lindsay Buckingham, who are more or less the models for Daisy and Billy.
Essentially, the series is literally a soap opera, full of arias, emotional highs and lows, intrigues and confrontations, sentimentality, and romance novel tropes. To frame that in a more positive light, it’s an attempt to recreate the ambiance of a classic Hollywood melodrama, in a similar way that Bradley Cooper did with A Star Is Born, released in 2018, a year the series went into development.
If the story is trite, there’s some novelty in the format which, like Spinal Tap, is presented as an extended rockumentary. Scenes are set up with talking-head interviews, purportedly shot 20 years after the band’s final concert in 1977, though two decades are indicated by a few changes of wardrobe and hairstyle. (For a reality check, and a possible source of inspiration for the book and series, check out the 1988 documentary, Fleetwood Mac at 21 on Vimeo).
The first three episodes of the series, which are available on Friday, chart the band’s hybrid blues-pop origins, beginning with a Pittsburgh working-class band called The Dunne Brothers. They’re fronted by Billy (Claflin) and include his guitarist brother, Graham Dunne (Will Harrison), grumpy bass player Eddie Roundtree (Josh Whitehouse), and easygoing drummer Warren Rojas (Sebastian Chacon).
After a backstage meeting with an egotistical Los Angeles tour manager (Timothy Oliphant in a slyly amusing cameo), the band decides to move to L.A. to make it big. When they add English keyboardist, Karen Sirko (Suki Waterhouse) bringing their number to five, they whimsically decide to call themselves The Six. In effect, Billy’s masochistically devoted wife Camila (Camila Morrone) who works as a promoter and photographer, is the uncredited other member of the band.
In Los Angeles, a Quincy Jones-like producer, Teddy Price (Tom Wright) decides to pair them with a supposedly brilliant but undisciplined singer-songwriter, Daisy Jones (Keough), who is sick of men telling her what to do and taking credit for her work. Keough, the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, sings well, and has a manic charisma. Her outsize performance is the most compelling draw of this series, though Daisy’s onstage spinning, a la Stevie Nicks, gets dizzying.
Separate origin stories establish Daisy and Billy’s common bond in parental traumas. His dad was a deadbeat alcoholic; her wealthy mother was a hypercritical scold. Both retreat into the oblivion of sex, drugs, and booze, but Billy cleans up early while Daisy keeps drinking and using and they fight for control of the band and keeping their hands off each other. There are detours filling out the 10 45-minute episodes, including Daisy’s brief marriage and a trip to Greece (adding a tincture of Joni Mitchell to Daisy’s character).
Other subplots involve guitarist Graham’s crush on keyboardist Karen, and the resentful bass player, Eddie because, presumably, bass players never think they get enough credit. There’s a separate narrative strand about Daisy’s friend, a Donna Summer-like lesbian “disco pioneer,” Simone (Nabiyah Be, a fine singer). Her story, and her same-sex relationship with collaborator, Bernie (Ayesha Harris), are grafted onto the main story, serving as to fulfill the series’ LGBT and African American diversity quotients.
Ultimately, after too many bus rides, gigs, squabbles and repetitive crises, you begin to lose patience for these grown-up people who behave like tired toddlers. “Same old tired rock and roll tale — the drinking, the drugs, the loneliness,” moans Billy at one point. Acknowledging the cliché doesn’t exactly make it any more original, no matter how committed the series makers are to their vision of recreating the era.
As well as its carefully curated retro sets and wardrobe, the series sounds expensive, as Amazon has licensed a lot of period music, from Strawberry Alarm Clock to T-Rex, Carole King, Dusty Springfield, Billy Preston, Heart and Roxy Music, even The Rolling Stones, though the most insistent ear-worm of the series, on the opening credits of each episode, is Patti Smith’s “Dancing Barefoot.”
By comparison, the new simulated 70s tunes sound pale, over-wrought and earnest, like country music or opera. Between all that regret, ecstasy and despair, there’s not much room for rock and roll fun.
Daisy Jones & The Six. Starring Riley Keough, Sam Clafin, Camila Morrone, Will Harrison, Suki Waterhouse, Josh Whitehouse, Sebastian Chacon, Nabiyah Be and Tom Wright. Premieres March 3, with new episodes released every Friday through March 24 on Prime Video.