If music be the food of love, rock music is the stuff of lust. It’s a genre built on breaking taboos and harnessing horniness into song. Prime Video‘s Daisy Jones & The Six is a show about how two people’s simmering desire for each other transformed them into rock gods for a short, tumultuous moment. It’s also a show that sanitizes the sensuality of rock to appeal to a lamer crowd. Daisy Jones & The Six is a mixed bag of electrifying performances, earworm-y music, fabulous fashion, and strangely celibate rock stars.
Daisy Jones & The Six is Prime Video’s big and buzzy adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s best-selling novel of the same name. Set up as an oral history, the book uses “interviews” with former ’70s rock stars to piece together its sudsy tale of sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. The show opts for a similar documentary structure, juxtaposing interviews with “older” versions of the characters and a dramatization of their story. (The hair and makeup on the actors in these confessional segments is laughably unbelievable.)
The first three episodes follow aspiring singer-songwriter Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) and a Pittsburgh-based rock band on their parallel journeys to success. As a disaffected LA teen, Daisy finds herself drawn to the Sunset Strip’s burgeoning rock scene. However, her beauty makes her prey for a series of chauvinists who steal her best creative ideas, citing her as their “muse.” Daisy’s life changes when record producer Teddy Price (Tom Wright) encourages her first to hone her craft and later to help struggling band The Six on their comeback single. The Six’s frontman Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin) is a recovering addict who wants to make a sappy love song for his wife Camila (Camila Morrone) into a hit. After Daisy transforms the song into a duet about an imploding romance, it becomes a smash. And when it becomes obvious that Daisy is the secret sauce The Six need, she joins the band. The problem? Pill-popping, champagne-swilling Daisy and married teetotaler Billy very clearly want to bone.
Now, you might think that Daisy and Billy would just hook up like normal debauched rock stars of the era. However, Billy is wholly devoted to being a good husband and father. So the two work out their passion through music. They write messages of longing into the band’s lyrics and become known for the intense way they share one mic. They become the biggest rock stars in the world…until backstage drama rips the band apart.
The best part of Daisy Jones & The Six is its sexy and charismatic cast. Daisy Jones truly is the role Riley Keough was born to play. Elvis Presley’s granddaughter has steadily built a filmography full of fabulous turns in indie gems and sleeper hits. In Daisy Jones & The Six, Keough finally harnesses her unearthly beauty and intoxicating energy to full effect. Daisy makes being a rock star seem effortless, but she struggles to function as a human being, numbing herself with narcotics and throwing herself at fleeting sensations of joy. Sam Claflin’s Billy Dunne comes fully alive in Daisy’s presence. The actors have a chemistry that burns behind their eyes, if not between the sheets. Camila Morrone, Suki Waterhouse, Will Harrison, Sebastian Chacon, Josh Whitehouse, Nabiyah Be, and a preposterously wigged Timothy Olyphant all acquit themselves well; but it’s Keough and Claflin’s show.
While Daisy Jones & The Six successfully brings the book’s characters and music to life, pacing-wise, it suffers from a similar problem as Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy. A fun, breezy book has been stretched out on screen in the most plodding way possible. There’s not enough story to justify a 10 episode-long series. It takes a tortuously long time for Daisy and Billy to even meet, let alone for her to join the band. Just as it seems the show has found its groove, Daisy Jones & The Six makes an episode-long detour in Greece to watch its unpredictable heroine consider the philosophical nature of art. The story should have been tightened.
Daisy Jones & The Six is also bizarrely asexual. For a time that is famously summed up with the phrase, “sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll,” this version of the ’70s is decidedly tame. The rock star characters in Daisy Jones & The Six do tons of drugs and play tons of rock ’n’ roll, but stick to a few scant PG-rated love scenes. The few real sex scenes in the show portray the act as incredibly boring. The show’s perversely prudish attitude towards sex takes the edge off of the whole story and frames its characters as, uh, sort of lame.
Still, Daisy Jones & The Six succeeds where it matters most: getting you to care about Daisy Jones, Billy Dunne, and their music. If only the show’s relationship to the sensuality of the era wasn’t as tortured as Daisy and Billy’s love.
Daisy Jones & The Six premieres on Prime Video on Friday, March 3.