The series establishes these personalities early, then backtracks into the past to show us how they were calcified. And some of them, like Daisy and Billy, are caught up in their own mixture of bitterness and bemusement whatever happened between the two of them, it hurt. Some of them are nostalgic, like the easygoing, wisecracking Warren. Some of them are matter-of-fact about what they had and what they lost, like the brusque Karen. In the 1990s, an unseen filmmaker trying to understand what really happened back then interviews the mostly reticent former band members: lead singers and songwriters Daisy Jones (Keough) and Billy Dunne (Claflin), lead guitarist Graham Dunne (Will Harrison), bassist Eddie Roundtree (Josh Whitehouse), drummer Warren Rojas (Sebastian Chacon), and keyboardist Karen Sirko (Suki Waterhouse). But the appeal of these performances only accentuates how the surrounding material of Daisy Jones & The Six, the connective tissue that is meant to ground this story in a recognizable reality, often feels like a diorama: stylishly designed, but paper-thin.ĭaisy Jones & The Six uses a documentary-style frame to tell the story of the titular band, who got huge in the 1970s and then just stopped - stopped making music after one album, stopped touring after one sold-out nationwide jaunt, and stopped being friends. The cast transcends nearly all of these limitations - and some inevitable comparisons to the similar-in-subject film Almost Famous - to craft enjoyable melodrama if you’re convinced by Keough’s unflinching stare or how Claflin clenches that sculptural jawline, you’ll be hooked early on. And for a story set in the ’70s, it’s inconsistently political, elevating a queer-character arc but erasing a meaningful subplot from the novel about the Vietnam War.
The world-building is teeny-tiny, confined to the interiors of mid-century homes, buses, and recording studios brief visits to Greece or New York City are only interruptions, not immersions.
Creative process is recurrently pushed aside for romantic pining, and there’s no imagination for artistic motivation past jealousy and lust. The series shrinks Reid’s novel ( partially inspired by the infamously stormy relationship between Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham) into a claustrophobic love triangle mostly uninterested in looking beyond its three points, and indifferent to the paranoia and exhilaration of the 1970s. For all the series’ delights - the chemistry between Sam Claflin and Riley Keough, the constant scene-stealing by Camila Morrone, the fizziness of the original songs - there’s an unignorable smallness throughout, a sense that, as with that Fleetwood Mac T-shirt, we’re settling for a copy of a copy. That same dilemma plagues Daisy Jones & The Six, Prime Video’s adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s best-selling 2019 novel. You’re buying an advertisement, not a time machine. But what no amount of money can do is take you back to the time and the place that shaped the music your T-shirt is conveying appreciation for. The garment links you, the listener, to them, the band, and you can be part of that public fandom for $39 or so. The dye from the graphic transfer is fresh and the seams are unfrayed there’s crisp newness to the product. Watching Daisy Jones & The Six is a bit like buying a Fleetwood Mac T-shirt from Urban Outfitters.
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