Gosh, do I love the ’70s! America’s Weirdest Decade is always a source of entertainment, whether it’s actual culture produced by the most drugged-up people in history at the time, or the tribute-culture produced by the slightly less drugged-up people who may or may not remember it. Many of the best and weirdest aspects of that time (and the place that produced it, which is to say southern California at its most southern California-est) are contained in the story of Fleetwood Mac, upon which Daisy Jones & the Six — both the best-selling novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, which I have not read, and the Amazon Prime mini-series based on it, which I unfortunately have seen — is loosely based.
The “loosely based” is important, because many of the principals of the story that inspired it (the relationship between Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks and the recording of the Rumours album) are still alive and in the possession of aggressively litigious attorneys. Still, just the mere shell of that story is enough to go on, and in other hands, might have produced a small masterpiece of television. But instead, we get a huge, overinflated disappointment, an overlong, trite, and energy-free production that has hints of what it might have been but just ends up as something considerably less interesting than the equivalent of the same story told through the lens of a VH-1 Behind the Music episode.
Daisy Jones & the Six wants to tell the story of the unlikely marriage of a precocious, willful child of privilege (Daisy) and a hard-rocking working-class bar band from Pittsburgh (the Six), who somehow come together to form the most popular and innovative act of the late ’70s. They conquer the charts only to dramatically disintegrate on stage at what should be the pinnacle of their success, thanks to the dysfunctional personal relationships that poison their ability to work together. It’s a familiar rock ‘n’ roll story — to the point that at least one scene features a band member lampshading what a cliche it all is — but instead of making it funny, or tragic, or even particularly dramatic, it comes across in the end like a story that was created by combing through the TV Tropes sections on ‘rock bands’ and turning into a script.
The problems start out in the very beginning: It’s a young and largely unknown cast, which isn’t necessarily a problem, but none of them are particularly compelling actors in their roles, which definitely is. The only big name in the credits is Timothy Olyphant, who acts like (and very well may have been) paid in weed as he stumbles through a handful of scenes as the band’s road manager on his way to a better show. Sam Claflin looks like a rock star, but he doesn’t act like one, and his charisma is purely in his face and not in any of the hokey lines that come out of it; Riley Keough at least puts a little verve into her Daisy Jones, but a character that’s supposed to read as rebellious, independent, and determined instead just comes across as petulant and unpleasant.
The remaining cast doesn’t come across as much better. One character was written out of the script from the book, allegedly to give the rest of the band more backstory; this is truly inexplicable, because they are all so thinly portrayed you could replace them with cardboard cut-outs that have their elevator-pitch lines written on a Post-It and stuck to the face. There’s the ambitious bass player, the guitarist jealous of his brother’s place in the spotlight, the fun-loving drugged-out drummer, and the keyboardist, who’s, uh, a woman. They’re supported by Claflin’s long-suffering, saintly wife and not one, but two Magical Negroes: the band’s producer/surrogate father, played by Tom Wright, and Daisy’s best friend, an aspiring disco singer played by Nabiyah Be, who is also given a lesbian romance in accordance with the new prestige television mandate that every show must feature a go-nowhere subplot that assures viewers that it’s Okay to Be Gay. Neither have any compelling backstory or motivation, and both exist purely to provide unquestioning support for the asshole white people the show is really about.
Most fatally for a story that’s about a rock band, the script doesn’t seem to know much or care much about music, or the processes that go into making it. Fleetwood Mac famously succeeded in creating a gripping (and hugely popular) fusion of the band’s British white-blues origins and the California pop stylings of Buckingham and Nicks, but it’s hard to believe there’s any universe in which Daisy Jones’ meandering, formless Joni Mitchell ramblings and the Six’s clunky mustache rock would combine to produce anything that an audience in 1977 would care about. The band’s actual songs, largely written by West Coast producer and session hound Blake Mills, manages to sound too modern and too dated at the same time, and the focus on Daisy and Billy gives us no reason to care about the rest of the group’s musical contributions any more than we do their personalities. It’s got a terrific soundtrack of period hits, although the inclusion of an actual Fleetwood Mac track (“Gold Dust Woman”, a better summation of what the show is supposed to be about that tells the story more effectively in five minutes than Daisy Jones & the Six does in ten hours) is so on the nose as to be seriously embarrassing. Josh Whitehouse grouses about having to play bass without ever just switching to guitar of his own initiative; Be performs duets with the Six despite their sounds having nothing in common; and Suki Waterhouse’s character is constantly praised for her keyboard chops even though you can almost never hear them in the songs. It’s all a big soggy mess.
The rest of the production is a real mixed bag. Sometimes it looks great; the fashion and style is all pretty on point, as is the re-creation of legendary West Coast music venues, but it does the usual mistake of so many period pieces of thinking it has to present everything that happened in the culture at the same time. One eye-rolling scene occurs when Will Harrison visits a punk club in New York and instantly has a flash of ‘the future of music’, and when a snotty performer says “I think my kid sister listens to you guys”, he makes sad faces like he’s digging his own grave, as if punk ever threatened to overthrow the commercial success of mainstream rock, or a 28-year-old would be driven to irrelevancy by a 25-year-old. Like a lot of post-COVID streaming shows, Daisy Jones & the Six looks weirdly cheap; there’s a scene that’s supposed to be their big break-out at a huge festival concert in Hawaii is quite clearly filmed in some scrubby vacant lot in SoCal with around a hundred extras crowding together. It’s precise about details that don’t matter, and way off about ones that do.
Most of all, though, and to get to the heart of it: how do you take not just the Fleetwood Mac story, but basically any story of the L.A. music scene from the mid-’60s to the mid-’80s (which period featured, among many other things, incredible racial and political conflict, uncountable amounts of money, some of the most amazing music ever made, legions of freaks and weirdos and street people and crazies including the actual Manson Family, more drugs per capita than maybe any time and place in American history, an isolated Wild West canyon in the middle of the city, and the actual, factual CIA roaming freely around screwing with anything they could get their bloody mitts on) and make it boring? Rock biopics (or their off-brand equivalents) can get away with a lot of blurring around the edges, but the one thing they can’t be is dull. Skip the incredibly overstuffed, torpidly paced ten episodes of this dud and just play Rumours instead.