There’s a moment about halfway through Daisy Jones & the Six, Amazon’s sprawling adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling book, in which the show achieves the emotional jolt it so often mimes. It’s the mid-1970s, and the Six, a combustible rock band loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac, are performing at a music festival in Hawaii; Daisy Jones (Riley Keough), the ethereal Stevie Nicksian singer-songwriter who helped deliver the band’s first hit, is supposed to join them four songs in. But she jumps the gun, traipsing on stage after the opener on pills and a swig of whiskey, much to the chagrin of territorial frontman Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin).
It’s a rare unpredictable scene in a show rife with rock’n’roll cliches and 70s facsimiles. The ensuing rendition of Look at Us Now (Honeycomb), a clear homage to Fleetwood’s The Chain that did get stuck in my head for several days, was palpably stressful, in the way that people being chaotic and potentially embarrassing in front of other people makes me immediately reach for the pause button. There’s a shiver of excitement – not for the music, which is just fine, nor for the first “performance” of Daisy Jones & the Six, which plays out as you’d expect (serviceable to us, catnip to the fans) and which band members promptly tell us was special, but for a fleeting glimpse of the mercurial, magnetic, destabilizing thing that is star power.
That ineffable quality – the reason why some people pop on screen, why Keough’s volatile charisma worked here, or why the Six and millions of other people worldwide fell for Daisy in the novel’s tale of creative ecstasy and implosion – is difficult to reverse-engineer. It’s the fundamental issue plaguing Daisy Jones & the Six, an intended tent-pole series and one of the biggest bets in Reese Witherspoon’s gushing book-to-screen pipeline that, for all its alleged volcanic chemistry, has fizzled on impact. Many reviewers have accurately pointed out that the 10-hour series feels surprisingly small and artificial, at once too long and not enough. It’s a diet soda version of love, lust and 70s music, a heavily promoted shrug.
That’s surprising, in that there are plenty of reasons why the book seemed perfectly suited for television: the 70s nostalgia; the descriptions of alchemical live performances; the inevitable love triangle between Daisy, Billy and his unfailingly supportive wife Camila (Camila Morrone); the book’s oral history format, which translates into characters reflecting on their past in a 90s documentary à la Behind the Music. It makes business sense – the book, which has sold over a million copies, has a built-in fanbase. (Witherspoon’s production company, Hello Sunshine, which has also shepherded bestsellers Little Fires Everywhere and Where the Crawdads Sing into uneven screen adaptations, snapped up the rights before Reid even sold the manuscript.) Amazon has the resources to actualize its iconography, namely Daisy Jones & the Six’s Rumours: an album called Aurora, which now exists in full on Spotify.
But it’s not surprising in that for all the well-intentioned effort – and both Amazon Studios and the actors are trying very hard here – it is simply very, very difficult to translate the sensation of popular music from theory or reality to screen. Amazon wasted no expense in constructing the book’s music, including 25 original songs overseen by producer Blake Mills, written in collaboration with such musical figures as Phoebe Bridgers, Marcus Mumford, Jackson Browne, Madison Cunningham and Chris Weisman. Atlantic Records released Aurora to streaming services; Pitchfork gave it a 6.6 rating, calling the album a “Broadway tribute” to Fleetwood Mac. But it runs into the same problem as most music-themed shows and films, from HBO’s ill-fated Vinyl to any number of biopics, when attempting to depict music magic: how do you work backward from the mythos of a hit? Star power is a hard thing to describe, and an even trickier thing to bottle.
While musical biopics, from Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis to Rocketman, Bohemian Rhapsody and I Wanna Dance With Somebody, must overcome the potentially distracting trap of impersonating a known figure, films with fictional hit music must achieve a similarly improbable feat: creating songs that are not only good, but believable as something you would absorb from the cultural atmosphere. The best depictions of pop have sidestepped the music question – Cameron Crowe’s 2000 film Almost Famous, a clear antecedent to Daisy Jones which combined original songs and real 70s rock, worked because the fictional band’s backstage travails were supposed to eclipse their musical talent. (The film’s most memorable scene is not a stage performance, but Billy Crudup’s well-delivered “I am a golden god!” acid trip.) The TV series Rap Sh!t and We Are Lady Parts focus more on the thrill of collaboration than the actual musical product. Bradley Cooper’s A Star Is Born benefited by casting an actual pop star, Lady Gaga, to deliver on the film’s one great song in a saga of two oppositional fame arcs.
There are issues with Daisy Jones & the Six beyond the mimicry trap: a few terrible wigs (whatever is happening with Timothy Olyphant’s hair is particularly egregious), a lot of cliched bottle-swigging. There’s little depth afforded to the other bandmates – played by Suki Waterhouse, Josh Whitehouse, Sebastian Chacon and Will Harrison – beyond their adjacency to Daisy and Billy, whose chemistry feels more structural than organic. The show bafflingly indicates the passage of 20 years’ time with mere hair changes and a shadow of makeup.
These would be small frustrations if not for the maybe impossible task the show sets out: to create a genre-smashing, world-dominating, Fleetwood Mac-esque colossus from scratch. It is hard to buy a story hinging on the undeniable talent and originality of the duo at its center when the performances and music are just good. Hearing that you’ve witnessed the birth of something great is not the same as seeing it, let alone believing it. Daisy Jones & the Six is an often enjoyable watch, with songs to nod along to, but all the effort and budget and sincerity in the world cannot conjure stardom.
