"Daisy Jones & The Six" - Prime Video Review
Based on Taylor Jenkins Reid’s beloved novel of the same name, Daisy Jones & The Six tells the story of the greatest fictitious rock band ever. Their claim to fame was one magnificent album before disbanding. The band includes Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin), Graham Dunne (Will Harrison), Eddie Roundtree (Josh Whitehouse), Warren Rojas (Sebastian Chacon), Karen Sirko (Suki Waterhouse), and Daisy Jones (Riley Keough). Rounding out the cast of characters are Camilla Dunne (Camila Morrone), Billy’s wife, and Simone Jackson (Nabiyah Be), Daisy’s best friend. The miniseries consists mainly of present-day interviews with band members and flashbacks to the ’70s, when they were in their prime.
The interviews can feel a little hokey at first, but as the series continues and the modern-day appearances of the band members decrease, it becomes apparent that the documentary style is necessary. It’s fairly underutilized, and part of what makes the novel so special is the hindsight these contemporary interviews provide. It’s exciting because no character is allowed to be an unreliable narrator. They may contradict the facts, but the audience is able to see the truth about the past and in turn understand why the participants may feel the need to lie in their documentary interviews.
Credit: Lacey Terrell/Prime Video
As she has done so many times before, Keough commands the totality of each scene she’s in. Her magnetic presence is intoxicating, and is likely the reason she was cast in this role as the enigmatic Daisy Jones. In the first episode, when Daisy reluctantly sings one of the songs she’s written in her journal, the world stops. It’s the show’s selling point; the moment that proves this journey is going to be worthwhile. It’s evidence of the inherent star power of both Keough and her character. Daisy, in another person’s hands, could have been written as a manic pixie dream girl, but the series’ writers (with the help of the source book’s author Taylor Jenkins Reid) make her whole.
The first episode’s final scene intercuts Daisy singing at an empty bar with the band’s journey across the country. It connects these characters to each other, but it’s the easy way out. Daisy singing at that bar seems to be the culmination of her fears and anxieties, her inability to believe that she has It™, the ineffable magic that makes a star. But from Daisy’s perspective, it may have been a private moment for her teenage self, who had started writing songs as a way to get through pain. For the world and the three people in the bar, the concert is inconsequential. For Daisy, it’s life-saving and monumental on a scale that’s difficult to fathom unless you’re the one living through it.
Credit: Lacey Terrell/Prime Video
Shying away from the moment of impact is something that Daisy Jones & The Six unfortunately repeats in the second episode when it’s time for The Six to audition for Teddy Price (Tom Wright). This is the moment that will make or break them as a band, but we don’t get to see it. So far, the audience understands that The Six (formerly the Dunne Brothers) are a good band, but there hasn’t been a moment that truly sells the viewer on Billy’s frontman status. Perhaps that’s because Claflin is thirty-six and playing someone in his early twenties. He just can’t seem to capture the reckless youthfulness that’s needed here. It’s not a knock on Claflin’s performance, just the unfortunate reality of a casting decision. The Claflin who was dreamy and confident in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire would be more suited for this role.
To make Daisy Jones & The Six succeed, the show has to get us to believe two things. The first has already been alluded to. The audience needs to believe in the band’s lightning-in-a-bottle magic. The show does eventually get there, and pretty much proves the band’s worth and the fact that Daisy Jones & The Six have solidified their place as one of the coolest fictional bands to ever exist. Those who read the book will notice some lyrical changes (“Regret Me” is a particularly egregious deviation from the source material), but most of the alterations can be forgiven due to the pure joy of finally hearing these songs.
Credit: Lacey Terrell/Prime Video
The other burden on the series is creating the belief that Daisy and Billy have something between them that's more than your run-of-the-mill romance. The book excelled at portraying the push and pull, the deep yearning that makes them vulnerable, destructive, and alive. At one point in the novel, Daisy says, “People say it's hard to be away from the people you love but it was so hard to be right next to him.” That’s how painful it was supposed to be for these two people to share the stage. It’s a burning desire that never fully comes across between the show’s versions of Daisy and Billy. The ingredients are there, but the indefinable magic of chemistry doesn’t come through to save the day. Chemistry is either there or it’s not, and its presence is subjective. Some may watch and feel the same yearning that exists in the novel, while others may not. The heart of the matter is that for Daisy Jones & The Six to reach the heights of its source material, the viewer has to buy into the chemistry.
What remains is a compelling pseudo-docuseries about a rock ‘n roll band that shined so brightly before exploding into nothingness. Daisy Jones & The Six is a fever dream of ’70s nostalgia, longing for a time and existence that will never happen again. Sure, they’re fictitious, but one doesn’t need to squint to see the Fleetwood Mac similarities. Daisy Jones & The Six speaks to a rockstar phenomenon of a bygone era, and it would be foolish to say it’s not exciting to live the high life like that for ten dreamy episodes.
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