Adapted by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber ("The Disaster Artist") from the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, "Daisy Jones & The Six" is a soap opera wrapped inside a period backstage musical. Set largely in the 1970s, the novel is rendered as an oral history, the story of the slow-then-fast rise and sudden fall of a rock band. The 10-episode series, which premiered Friday on Amazon Prime Video, echoes it with a documentary framing — that is, the action is interspersed with scenes in which characters respond to an interviewer 20 years in the future (the late '90s, saving the production team the trouble of aging the characters half a century).
If it gains an actual soundtrack, the book does lose something in translation, as multiple narrators' viewpoints are largely merged into a straightforward telling. Reid's approach also means there's not a lot of dialogue on the page, and so the adaptation is very much a thing of extrapolation and elaboration, with changes and additions to make it more conventionally dramatic — more like a TV series. And as a TV series, it's perfectly fine, in a paradoxically low-wattage, high-intensity way, though it does go on a little long and requires some willful suspension of disbelief.
Riley Keough plays Daisy, a poor little rich girl from the Hollywood Hills, whom we first meet knocking around the Sunset Strip as a teenager in the late 1960s, getting into trouble more implied than shown. Later, she starts to scribble her deepest thoughts into lyrics, and she works her lyrics into songs. (It felt "even better than drugs," future Daisy remembers.)
