“I’m not the muse – I’m the somebody.”
These words are spoken by the title character of Daisy Jones & the Six (Prime Video) near the end of the first episode.
She’s talking to a lame boyfriend named Gary who’s thinking about putting one of her artfully-crafted lines into a script.
As is made very clear, her words sum up the entire series, in which Daisy and her group the Six make it to superstardom, despite the sexism of the early 1970s.
This streaming TV version of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s 2019 novel takes inspiration from the second coming of Fleetwood Mac, although it’s not a direct adaptation of their lives in any sense.
A bit like Almost Famous
Stories about the glory days of ‘70s rock aren’t rare, with recent television series like Vinyl and Pistol keeping the canon going.
What Daisy Jones most resembles, though, is the original and most well-known of the genre, Cameron Crowe’s 2000 hit film Almost Famous.
Crowe’s film is a beautiful evocation of the way music creates a sense of recklessness and redemption in a young heart.
But viewed from a distance it’s very old-fashioned in many ways. In Crowe’s story, men are the glorious, visionary artistic screw-ups, there to be saved by women – groupies, in fact – who inspire their great work.
Daisy Jones & the Six feels as though Reid saw Almost Famous and was determined to tell the other side of the story.
In Daisy’s (Riley Keough) persona and her fictional history, there are echoes of not just Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks and Christine McVie, but also Janis Joplin.
Titanic women of rock
Meanwhile, the theme song – Patti Smith’s Dancing Barefoot – pays tribute to another titanic woman in ‘70s rock.
While Smith got her start in New York, though, this story is pure LA.
The first three of 10 episodes arrived on Friday, with more batches due over the next three weeks.
By the end of this first dump, Daisy and her band have just got together, with two parallel stories ongoing beforehand.
In Pittsburgh, school blues-rock band The Dunne Brothers – led by Graham (Will Harrison) and his local heartthrob older brother Billy (Sam Claflin) – are persuaded to move to LA in search of fame.
Billy’s girlfriend Camila (Camila Morrone) is emotionally and practically supportive, but betrayed by his drug and alcohol-induced breakdown and disloyalty as fame grows near.
Well-made drama
The unknown but supremely talented Daisy, meanwhile, takes diner jobs and refuses to compromise, despite the determination of super producer Teddy Price (Tom Wright) to work with her.
Eventually he manages to bring her and the renamed band together, with her star on the rise and Billy’s on the wane.
What happens between now and the group’s bitter, briefly-glimpsed split after a 1977 concert in Chicago will be seen over the next few weeks.
It’s a thoughtful, well-crafted drama which perhaps doesn’t break any new group, and also suffers when the Six’s pleasant original songs are compared to the classics of the era which fill the soundtrack.
Yet Riley Keough is the real revelation here – charismatic, magnetic and a singer whose talent lives up to the show’s premise.
Considering she’s Elvis Presley’s granddaughter, perhaps her palpable star quality is no surprise.
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