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Prime Video: Daisy Jones & the Six and Swarm
Daisy Jones & the Six is like an easy listening album of cover versions of some of your favorite songs. It’s hummable, but you’re pretty sure you remember the originals having sharper teeth.
Based on Taylor Jenkins Reid’s novel, the 10-episode Prime Video drama is a Behind the Music documentary of things that never happened but seem weirdly familiar. Think Fleetwood Mac with all its 1970s sex, drugs and personal vendetta lyrics ironed out by a half-century’s nostalgia and hearsay.
In this as-told-to narrative about a fictional band, the actors (though they look not one day older) speak to the camera directly as they remember the formation, rise to fame and overnight collapse of their rock ‘n’ roll dreams 20 years earlier.
Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin, easy on the eye but fatally boring as an actor) is a Pittsburgh boy recruited by some of his high school buddies and brother Graham (Will Harrison) to put together a band. Soon, he’s the leader, whose serious control issues make his slide into substance abuse look preordained. (The series ticks off his disintegration and recovery early in the narrative, and tackles the monkey perched on another character’s shoulder much later, making addiction look like a lot of the plot points: a little too simple.)
Anyway, Six follows the Dunne brothers’ move to Los Angeles and their discovery by star producer Teddy Price (a pleasurable slow-burn performance by Tom Wright). It’s his bright idea to pair the boys and their musicians with Los Angeles wild child and songwriter Daisy Jones. Herself real-life rock ‘n’ roll royalty as the granddaughter of Elvis, Riley Keough gives the show its single reliable source of adrenaline whenever she’s onscreen.
The intended dramatic engine of the series is the will-they-won’t-they creative/romantic tension between Billy and Daisy. Two strong-willed, talented musicians (and, of course, hot), they butt heads and their lips come perilously close. But Daisy is a mess, and Billy is woefully beholden to his saintly wife Camila. (Model-turned-actor Camila Morrone can’t redeem the cliche; she’s as pretty and boring as screen-husband Claflin.)
In a side plotline, a roommate of Daisy, a singer named Simone (Nabiyah Be) peels off to New York, the 1970s disco scene and romance with another woman. This gives some racial and sexual diversity to a story that’s otherwise very White and very straight. Despite the 10-hour runtime, Six doesn’t find ways to make the other band members stand out. They barely pop, except for Harrison and Suki Waterhouse, playing the too-cool-for-school Brit keyboardist who embarks on a downlow romance with him. (We also glimpse Timothy Olyphant as the tour manager, notable mainly for a series of bad wigs.)
So with all these caveats, why do I recommend the show? Well, the music’s nice. And I’m a sucker for well-done pastiche. With its expertly ear-wormy songs paying homage to the Brill Building era, written by the likes of Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach, I loved the 1996 film Grace of My Heart about a very Carole King-like songwriter. And on Broadway, Stephen Sondheim’s score for Follies — riffing on theatrical song styles from the early 20th century — makes it one of his best musicals. In similar fashion, the soundtrack of Daisy Jones assembles contemporary musicians like Phoebe Bridgers and Blake Mills to create an ersatz but pleasing sonic SoCal quilt that evokes 1970s sunshine and mescaline.
At the end of this long series, I didn’t get teary-eyed or anything like that. But I found the proudly square, cake-and-eat-it-too resolution of its final 10 minutes satisfying in a guilty-pleasure way. Daisy Jones & the Six is one of those shows that can give you a lot of pleasure . . . without ever being, you know, actually good.
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Also taking on the arena-rock world but in a very sideways way, Prime Video’s Swarm comes with so much anticipation due to the Atlanta creator Donald Glover’s involvement, there’s no way it couldn’t disappoint. And man, it really disappoints.
That’s despite a very game performance by HBO’s Deuce veteran Dominique Fishback. She plays Dre, a hyper stan of a fictional pop star called Ni’Jah (Nirine S. Brown) whose rabid fans are known as the Swarm (their motto: “Talk about Ni’Jah, you get stung”). This is not a work of fiction,” the fictional series disclaims, encouraging us to make the obvious comparisons to Beyoncé and her Beyhive.
Only, I haven’t heard about any Beyoncé fans avenging their queen by killing her detractors via bludgeoning, shooting or driving cars multiple times over their bodies. Dre does that again and again and again in a series in which repetition makes half-hour episodes seem longer than they are.
That’s no fault of Fishback’s. She gives the role her all, but it betrays her. By the end, I think Swarm wants us to feel compassion or pity for Dre. We can’t, though, because the show’s makers haven’t loved the character enough themselves to give her more than a single personality trait. And whatever it’s trying to say about fandom, I’m not sure what that message is . . . or who its intended audience is meant to be.
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APPLE TV+: Extrapolations
Good intentions go splat in Apple TV+’s eight-episode Extrapolations, continuing with weekly installments through April 21. Imagining life on earth with an accelerating climate crisis that’s talked about incessantly but never solved, the limited series from creator Scott Z. Burns (writer of the prophetic 2011 film Contagion) leaps years ahead each episode, starting in 2037 and finishing in 2070. If the end is nigh, it takes forever to get there.
Expensive-looking yet feeling claustrophobic, Extrapolations often resembles a pious PowerPoint presentation. Its strident dialogue — focused on allocated carbon units, rising tides turning Miami into Venice, and seeding the earth’s atmosphere — are interrupted by clumsy moments of family-based grievances among interchangeable characters.
As the series spans time, the focus on climate change gets blurry. Later episodes, like the one starring Tahar Rahim (who plays both a man and his son in different storylines) as a kind of cosplay gigolo, feel like something an ambitious young writer might come up with after falling asleep to a couple of episodes of the great Netflix series Black Mirror.
A ridiculously gifted international cast show off their environmental cred by turning out for what should and could have been an important streaming project. They include Oscar winners Marion Cotillard and Forest Whitaker, Games of Thrones heartthrob Kit Harington, Hamilton’s Daveed Diggs, Edward Norton, Judd Hirsch and, yes, in a double role as a cancer patient and a talking humpback whale, acting legend Meryl Streep.
I wish the news were better for viewers and for our planet. But Extrapolations feels like it’s preaching to those of us who nod in agreement with its message while sorting our plastics and paper products for recycling and deciding which reusable canvas tote to take to the farmer’s market in Piedmont Park.
However, if you’re an Apple TV+ subscriber, it’s not all bad news (especially if you love a good show tune or even bad ones). The second season of the fantasy musical parody Schmigadoon!, starring Cecily Strong, Keegan-Michael Key, Ariana DeBose, Martin Short, Kristin Chenoweth and others, returns for its second season on April 7.
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NETFLIX: Chris Rock, The Strays, Murdaugh Murders, The Night Agent
Speaking of a warming planet, Chris Rock tries to come in hot a year too late. He winds up feeling only lukewarm in his special Chris Rock: Selective Outrage.
Yeah, he finally talks about The Slap. The Slap is the main reason people want to watch Rock’s special. But Rock complains that people only want him to talk about The Slap. “I’m not a victim, baby,” he tells his live audience. But that’s what he sounds like, especially when he puts most of the blame on Jada Pinkett Smith instead of her pugilistic husband Will. When your basic viewpoint is, “she started it first,” you’ve lost the argument. Not that there’s really much argument in Selective Outrage, just a bunch of complaining and some tired jokes about cancel culture, abortion and sex. More than anything, Selective Outrage plays like an anti-audition tape for ever serving as Oscar host again.
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Meanwhile, Jordan Peele has a lot to answer for. His blending of genre thrills with racial/social commentary has been so shrewd, smart and skillful in Get Out, Us and Nope, he makes it look easy. The Netflix film The Strays demonstrates why it’s a lot harder than it looks. (Prime Video’s terrible 2021 series Them is an even more offensive example.)
Ashley Madekwe, working hard in an impossible role, plays Neve, perfect Black wife to a perfect White husband and two perfect Mixed children in a perfect British community so gentrified, you suspect a gator-filled moat encircles the village. Neve’s collection of wigs is also perfect, but they all make her scalp itch, as indicators of her Internalized Racial Self Hatred. The metaphors are so bluntly pushed in writer-director Nathaniel Martello-White’s film, it’s almost a relief when the whole movie leaps the rails with the arrival of two young people, Marvin and Abigail (Jorden Myrie and Bukky Bakray) who represent Neve’s Secret Past.
I’ll leave the plot synopsis there, because finding out how it all turns out — in defiance of plausible human motivation by any of the characters — is the only OMG pleasure you might get from this disaster.
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Of course, we all know now how things turned out for disgraced South Carolina lawyer Alex Murdaugh. The three-episode documentary Murdaugh Murders: A Southern Scandal arrived on Netflix just in time to become almost immediately obsolete. It dropped on February 22, and the jury came back with its verdict only eight days later.
Still, there’s queasy fascination to be found in the show, giving us interviews with some of the people affected by the Murdaughs’ dynastic hold on that part of the Lowcountry. (If you’re a New York Times reader, you might also want to check out the extensive coverage by Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, talented journalist son of my longtime friend, Catherine Burroughs, a former Atlanta actor.)
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On another Netflix note: The new series The Night Agent had a big debut, raking in large viewing numbers when it landed last week. I watched most of the first episode, and I’ll try to return to it at some time, but I’m not thrilled about the prospect.
What I saw in its first hour reminded me of 20 years ago, when I was assigned to cover TV at my old newspaper. Back then, HBO’s The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood were just starting to wake American viewers up to the richness and complexity small-screen dramas could provide. At the time, network fare still ruled primetime. Night Agent recalls those old, post-9/11 broadcast shows. It leans on easy paranoia and tropes about a deep state and vast conspiracies – – the sort of lazy television scriptwriting that has rewired the IRL minds and biases of way too many arms-bearing citizens. But sure, I’ll try to give it another watch.
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HULU: Boston Strangler and History of the World Part II
Over on Hulu, Boston Strangler reminds us less of the notorious serial-killer case than the sad fact that investigative reporting is hard to make dramatically interesting onscreen. Three movies managed it pretty well: All the President’s Men, Zodiac and Spotlight. More recent, well-made attempts like 2017’s The Paper and 2022’s She Said felt like also-rans. So does Strangler. Keira Knightley and Carrie Coons work hard as women journalists in the 1960s, battling sexism and stereotypes to track a killer whose identity proved a lot slippier, then and now, than it should be. Lots of great elements here, but writer-director Matt Ruskin fumbles the ball, from his undistinguished script to his decision to shoot his movie in shades of dirty dishwater. A missed opportunity.
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Let’s end on a silly, upbeat note, shall we? If the current world is getting you down, you can always beat a retreat to the past — or at least the past as seen by that lovable old schmendrick Mel Brooks. His History of the World: Part II is a follow-up to his 1981 standalone flick,
The ratio of hits to misses is about equal, but the show throws so many jokes at the screen, it works. Brooks’s old Borscht Belt/Catskills rhythms and comedy targets get a marginal update from a team of writers that includes Nick Kroll and Wanda Sykes. But it’s still old hat, the kind of wind-down show you might want to sample right before bedtime. Whatever you’re watching these days, enjoy.
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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous Streaming column here.
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