America is from the 60’s. In Los Angeles, young Margaret grows up in the home of wealthy but cold parents, dreams of a career as a rock star, and always hangs out on the Sunset Strip (the “party” section of Sunset Boulevard is immortalized in Billy Wilder’s film noir). In parallel, in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, brothers Billy and Graham Dunn assemble with their friends their own band, The Dunn Brothers – at first for the sake of a selling point, but a little later in earnest. Over the next ten years, Margaret, who has a lot of songs written to the table, will take the pseudonym Daisy Jones and renew their Dunn Brothers roster, move to Los Angeles and rename themselves The Six (actually five); Worse joke than the names of Russian movies about Ocean’s friends). Together they will be put together by brilliant music producer Teddy Price. The rest is history.
More precisely, no – no Daisy Jones and The Six never existed. It was invented by writer Taylor Jenkins Reid, who watched many performances of the Fleetwood Mac group (known not only for its music, but also for its eternal drama) on television as a child, and at some point decided to pass on these impressions. with their own youthful memories. Reid specializes in this type of historical fiction: for example, in his most famous book, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, a fictional Old Hollywood star in old age suddenly decides to give an interview to a not very successful journalist and retells his life story.
The serial adaptation of Daisy Jones and the Six by Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber, writers of the anti-romcom 500 Days of Summer and the comedy biopic The Disaster Artist, meticulously perpetuates that illusion. To do this, the show resorts to a rather strange mix (but you quickly get used to) by imitating feature documentaries: it’s both a pseudo-biographical drama with a reconstruction of scenes from the band’s history, and fake documentaries. 20 years after the “breakup” with appendices “participant talks” refusing to say “what happened” between them (i.e. it all came out in 1997 as well).
So, if you put someone into a series without any prior knowledge, they won’t feel a catch and will likely climb up looking for Daisy Jones and The Six on the stream after watching. And she’ll find out: On the eve of the show’s premiere, the band stopped being so fictional and released a pretty tolerable debut album, “Aurora,” in which the lead actors Riley Keough and Sam Claflin sang (to fully comply). mythology of the series, it still needs to be multi-platinum).
But it’s not about the extraordinary talent of the writers, it’s about how standardized the musical biography genre really is. Judging by the first three episodes, “Daisy Jones and The Six” is in danger of becoming a regular parade of hits by crossed roads: sex, drugs, rock and roll, ups, downs, mix, repeat. In principle, you can put just about anyone into this formula – most likely, a mini-series about the real Fleetwood Mac band would look exactly the same if someone filmed it now.
Against this background, the surprising thing that started the day before the fairy tale “Daisy Jones and The Six”, based on the history of the “King and the Jester” group, looks much more original and creative, although not very well adapted. “Daisy Jones”, on the other hand, is technically excellent overall, but seems unable to cope with its main task. Would it be worth inventing without (and without) Daisy Jones and The Six? I think no