3 out of 5

Created by: Mick Jagger, Martin Scorsese, Rich Cohen and Terence Winter

covers season 1

I mean, look at that list of names up there; Winter is a heavy-hitter for HBO, with shows like Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire bearing his mark, and Rich Cohen has been writing about music since the 90s.  Then, of course, there’s Mr. New York himself Scorsese, and Mick Jagger, who, opinions on his band and output aside, was undeniably there for a lot of the craziness in the record biz, to put it mildly.  Seems like a pretty good set-up for a heavy-hitting drama about the music business in New York in the 70s, yes?  Sure.  And no.  The posters promoting Vinyl were a mix of both alienating and dismissable: seemingly indicating that here was a show that was going to tell you what music really is, created by some guys your dad likes.  To the modern listener, with his mad cache of digital wonders, there’s a huge world beyond Scorsese and Jagger, and the suspicion that they might not actually know a lot about that world…  And with plenty of movies having covered the turbulent careers of musicians from all different eras, is there really that much more to know beyond some flash facts about artist A or B?

The promise, of course, is that Vinyl might not be all name-dropping veneer, but rather something – if I may elevator pitch this – akin to Mad Men for the music industry.  That is: using the fascinating and disgusting facets of the time and place as a blanket over a character drama.

In its first season, Vinyl is not only sort of both of these things (playlist braggartry and era-soaked drama), it also bears the touches of each one of its creators… although they’re all sort of working at their own paces, making the show work in incredibly frustrating fits and spurts.  For better or worse, the bits that work are those that fall into the more behind-the-scenes bucket: Richie Finestra’s struggling label American Century and his wayward weaving through the industry to latch on to the spirit of what he considers “real” music while still making a decent dollar; the evolution of the show’s proto-punk group, The Nasty Bits; but there’s so much clutter to drag down these parts of interest… drug habits and affairs and murders and gambling…  I can understand the idea, to pitch this mess as an integral element of the setting, but the coke-fueled antics of our lead (played with an odd absent-minded fury by Bobby Cannavale) instead come across as the worst form of plot padding, just problems for problems’ sake.  This gets blended with the show’s sloppy weaving between reality and fiction, bringing names like Andy Warhol and Robert Goulet into the mix in ways that feel too winky to be relevant, not to mention the fake Nasty Bits’ rapacious single (which gets repeated a handful of times) is a pretty lazy pastiche, pretty much just saying “fuck” over a few chords.  (Insert comment here about how that’s an accurate representation of punk.)

So how is this three stars?  Why watch watch sounds like a rather confuddled bag of ideas?

Well, importantly, Vinyl never breaks character.  It has a heady, “serious” vibe from episode one that it holds on to, and it commits to being a mess.  It keeps shuffling its cards, letting seeming non-sequitors bumble on screen while treating them as notable subplots, while still following the tangled threads of its main couple storylines.  Characters don’t magically knock drinking or drug habits, or suddenly drop hit records: every step forward (for the story and for the show) results in someone banging their shin on an end table and cursing for a while before remembering why they were walking that direction.  And doubly importantly for these kinds of tales: we want it to work.  We want American Century to succeed, because the show does tap into that passion for music many of us have, and that’s something it makes sure we understand Richie shares.

Meanwhile, it remains a mess, and then random selects another song on its playlist while waggling its bushy eyebrows.  Alas, it’s not a bad song, and we remain curious just what will play next.