Daisy Jones & the Six is Fleetwood Mac cosplay, charting the formation, rise and fall of a ’70s rock band whose combative personalities, personal and professional jealousies, substance abuse problems and emotional entanglements fuel their music and their downfall.
Adapted from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s popular novel of the same name, it’s a story rooted in pop myth as much as reality—a situation that’s at once energizing and limiting. Marked by high highs and low lows, it’s akin to most memorable rock albums: a collection of superb hits surrounded by more than a few skippable tracks.
Prime Video’s 10-episode series (premiering March 3) is a work of overwhelming nostalgia, imagining rock’s sex, drugs, and loud-guitared heyday in loving fashion (that’s modeled after Cameron Crowe’s reflective 2000 drama Almost Famous)—while literally structuring itself as a wistful bio-documentary.
Guided by turn-of-the-century interviews with characters who recall their own saga, it assumes a rose-tinted rearview-mirror perspective on its chosen era, romantically amalgamating every aspect of genre lore into one outfit: Daisy Jones & the Six, who took the world by storm with their debut album Aurora, only to crumble under the weight of innumerable stereotypical burdens. It’s Rock 101 as filtered through a fictionalized lens, which allows it to condense and combine in both revealing and contrived ways.
There are two larger-than-life figures around which Daisy Jones & the Six revolves. The first is Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin), a Pittsburgh native who, along with his axman brother Graham (Will Harrison), guitarist-turned-bassist Eddie Roundtree (Josh Whitehouse), and drummer Warren Rojas (Sebastian Chacon) founds The Six, a straightforward act elevated by Billy’s magnetic frontman artistry.
The other is Daisy Jones (Riley Keough), a California wild-child songstress looking to break into the business alongside her best friend, R&B singer Simone Jackson (Nabiyah Be). Showrunners Scott Neustadter and Will Graham’s series spends its first few episodes detailing their respective backstories, putting them on a collision course that results in a big bang, all of it courtesy of star producer Teddy Price (Tom Wright), who—in the aftermath of Billy’s drug problems, which necessitate a stint in rehab and halt The Six’s momentum just as it’s starting—makes the brilliant decision to pair the band and Daisy, sparking creative and interpersonal fireworks.
Billy and Daisy are the de facto Lindsey Buckingham and Stevie Nicks of this odyssey, two kindred and complementary alphas looking to assert themselves as the band’s driving force. Their (and their mates’) ensuing ups and downs are inspired by a litany of standard rock stories.
The main template, however, is Fleetwood Mac, what with Daisy and Billy’s tempestuous sexual chemistry producing an equal number of fights and hits—which proves a constant problem for Billy, given that he’s married to photographer wife Camila (Camila Morrone)—and Eddie fuming about his second-banana status in the group and Graham beginning a secret affair with keyboardist (and Christine McVie proxy) Karen (Suki Waterhouse).
A shaggy collection of musicians churning out stadium-sized country-infused anthems that are strengthened by Billy and Daisy’s harmonies, Daisy Jones & the Six are a chart-topping powerhouse on the constant verge of explosion.
Explode they will by 1977, before the culmination of their first American tour for Aurora, the band’s Rumors-style smash LP. Daisy Jones & the Six packs a career’s worth of incidents into a few short years, and that compression comes across as somewhat artificial, as well as results in writing that veers wildly between incisive and clunkily expository.
A grander timeframe for its action would have afforded the material more room to breathe; as it is, the show is overstuffed, and that’s not even taking into consideration Simone’s storyline. Daisy’s best friend and an aspiring disco singer who’s also a Black lesbian attracted to a New York City club owner, Simone is a superfluous addendum to a tale that’s explicitly about ‘70s rock ‘n’ roll. Far better would have been to give the faux-Donna Summer her own series, where her unique life (and milieu) could have been better explored.
Daisy Jones & the Six is uneven in just about every respect. Keough and Claflin are largely charismatic and believable both on and off stage, and they share a nicely contentious chemistry. Still, they look too old for their respective parts, and their co-stars range from the convincing to the clumsy.
The band’s original songs—produced by Blake Mills and written by a collection of artists including Phoebe Bridgers, Jackson Browne and Marcus Mumford—have the tenor of ’70s compositions, although they’re more like approximations of Fleetwood Mac tunes than the real thing. The period trappings are never cartoonish, but they sometimes don’t seem completely genuine. Lacking Almost Famous’ outsider-looking-in perspective and A Star is Born’s rousing rock-disaster grandeur, the proceedings often resemble straightforward and flat fanfic, only to then strike a potent chord and capture the magic of their beloved time, place and sound.
There’s as much frustrating phoniness as enlivening authenticity in Daisy Jones & the Six, but when the former lands, it overshadows the latter. From Daisy and Billy’s fraught songwriting sessions (which are the series’ highlights, positing creativity as an act of simultaneous lovemaking and warfare) and blistering performances together, to the various road-weary difficulties wrought from navigating the decade’s music scene (bolstered by a stellar Timothy Olyphant turn as tour manager Rod Reyes), showrunners Neustadter and Graham locate moments of poignant truth amidst their paint-by-numbers action.
That’s showcased in two late scenes that directly address the romanticism and foolishness of decadent ’70s self-immolation. Every heavenly triumph and heartache-inducing failure is smushed into these ten installments, and though the action frequently plays like a greatest-hits package of rock-icon clichés—and wants for a more persuasive sense of desperation and delirium—it’s not without its charms.
Creativity and destruction are inherently intertwined for Daisy and Billy and, also, for Daisy Jones & the Six, whose best and worst instincts beget a series that’s alternately a pantomime pastiche and a fond and stirring tribute. Nonetheless, if the series demands that one wade through some early clunkers, it’s ultimately worth it for a back-half that’s at least as much killer as filler.
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