Week-to-Week: Daisy Jones & The Six has the plot, but not the perspective
Initial impressions of Amazon's slow-starting adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid's bestseller
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I took an e-book of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Daisy Jones & The Six with me on my recent world travels, and outside of occasionally forgetting that I needed to redownload it from the cloud on WiFi beforehand every time I wanted to read it on a flight, it served as a solid companion piece. However, the nature of my travels was that I wasn’t reading it very consistently: I’d often go days or even weeks before coming back to it, and as I write this I still haven’t finished it.1
As a novel, Daisy Jones & The Six is well-built for this kind of slow burn, to be honest. Sure, there’s a hook where you’re waiting to learn what specifically led to this wildly successful band to disband, but it’s not like it’s a giant mystery—there’s a line at one point where someone says they knew rhythm guitarist Eddie was going to blow up at Billy, and someone else is like “any idiot knew that.” Whether based on our understanding of the real-life inspirations (see: Fleetwood Mac) or the early details revealed through the oral history format, the combustible materials are in full view, and the eventual implosion is going to be less important than how we get there.
It’s why the oral history format is so effective, because every retelling of events is serving two purposes: it’s filling in plot, sure, but it’s also telling us something about the storytellers. Even before we see the primary source of Eddie’s resentment, we sense the anger as he recounts their early days where things were much simpler. And as Billy and Camila recount the early struggles in their marriage, their hindsight frames all of it, in a way that becomes as much about the perspective of age as the “cheating addict” of it all. When the people they become are present in these early moments, it makes even the period before they become Daisy Jones & the Six into a story about the band, and about their connection to each other. As a result, even though I only got through about a third of the book on my trip, I still felt like I had a really strong grasp of who the characters were, and the dynamics that helped the book connect with so many readers.
I knew going into Amazon’s long-awaited—they optioned the book before it was released—adaptation that it wasn’t going to be able to maintain this structure. Even though they do create a documentary framework and introduce occasional talking heads, in the book every single detail is told through competing points of view, and from at twice as much distance as the 20 years used in the show to avoid casting older versions of the characters. Beyond creating an aesthetic where you constantly realize that none of them look young enough in one timeline or old enough in the other, it makes the occasional jumps into the future into ineffectual throwaways, punctuation marks instead of actual sentences. And the result is three episodes that fail to make anything leading up to the recording of Billy and Daisy’s duet “Look At Us Now (Honeycomb)” even close to as interesting as it is in the novel.
And look, there’s no question that the book really gets going once the two characters start recording together. But whereas the book adds so much color and context that this moment feels like stars colliding, here it’s the first time the story wakes up from a sleepy start. It’s a great scene, but the talking heads were too infrequent to make it feel like a turning point in an ongoing story—it feels more like the end of a prologue, which didn’t accomplish enough to invest me in the show as a whole. There’s some work around Simone’s queerness that’s not in the book, but the other band members are complete ciphers, and the choice to excise Pete in favor of more time with Camila is offset by the character having less agency with the absence of her narrative voice that the book leans on.
I totally understand how we ended up with this very boring adaptation of this book, structurally speaking. It’s possible someone at some point threw out the idea of actually trying to adapt the oral history elements, showing us scenes from different perspectives and leveraging the unreliable nature of memory in terms of how the band flew too close to the sun. But I get how someone—probably an executive—insisted this was too complicated, that it would sully the story’s basic appeals as a tortured love triangle set in the era of sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll. And honestly, I’m willing to admit that a pedestrian, well-acted version of this story with great songs is probably going to meet Amazon’s goals of selling some books, streaming some music, and whatever other nonsense metrics a toilet paper company uses to judge the success of a series in this day and age.
But it’s a bit deflating to get to the end of a three-episode premiere and feel like everything that happened before “Honeycomb” probably could have been condensed into one episode without losing much. That’s not something I would say of the book it’s based on, but the story of their early days just doesn’t have enough going on to connect without the hindsight offered by the book’s narrative strategy. I’ll keep watching to see how they handle the dynamics of the collaboration, and because the performances are able to sustain my basic engagement, but based on these episodes this seems like an adaptation doomed to fail on a conceptual level.
Episodic Observations
Having Eddie switch to playing bass after Pete goes to college is such a copout. The whole point of Eddie’s character is that as the rhythm guitarist he is in a position to shape the band’s sound (especially as a “rock band”), but Billy is constantly stepping on his toes, his anger growing with each new indignity. By making Eddie’s resentment come from more overt choices—forcing him to be bassist instead, Eddie’s failed attempt to play frontman when Billy briefly quits—it’s just…not the same story, even if it will have the same result. Bad choices.
I feel similarly about the choices around Karen and Graham’s relationship, but that’s still not really a story here yet, so we’ll return to that if I drop in on the finale.
For more perspective on book-to-show changes, Episodic Medium contributor Ben Rosenstock has a breakdown over at Vulture. He definitely seems more positive than I am in terms of how well the show captures the books based on having seen more episodes, but some of what he details made me roll my eyes, so I may just be too jaded for this adaptation’s wavelength.
Smart choice by Amazon to release the entirety of Aurora on streaming services before the show itself gets to that moment. I’m still resisting listening to it in its entirety until I finish the book, but in some ways it kind of gets us a bit closer to an interesting narrative structure wherein we know the music before we see the story of how it came to be.
Update: I’m listening to it now, and I’m furious that they have retconned it so “Honeycomb” is on Aurora, as opposed to appearing on an earlier album, because Billy’s refusal to play it on the Aurora tour is such a perfect detail and makes…sigh. This is why reading novels is dangerous.
Timothy Olyphant and his moustache really deserve that “and” credit, even if he doesn’t get much to do here as their tour manager given they spend so little time on The Six’s first tour.
Speaking of Amazon literary adaptations, my boyfriend was mid-way through Christoph Waltz in The Consultant when I arrived one night, and we finished the rest of the season. Without knowing the source material, I don’t know how much the half-hour show’s struggles to cohere were byproducts of that process, but while Waltz is Waltzing as you’d expect the whole thing was kind of a mess. I co-sign Friend of the Newsletter Daniel Fienberg’s assessment that “If I didn’t know (or at least suspect) better, I’d think that Basgallop originally wrote The Consultant in 45-minute installments and then cut every other scene, irrespective of logic or continuity.”
And speaking of Friends of the Newsletter, and Daisy Jones and The Six, Alan Sepinwall helped spearhead a list of the Top 50 Real Songs by Fake Bands over at Rolling Stone, and went into some of the process over at his own newsletter. A fairly unimpeachable choice at #1, and I was happy to see Netflix’s short-lived Julie and the Phantoms survive the thunderdome and find immortalization on the list.
As ever, if you want to discuss Daisy Jones and the Six, The Consultant, or any other shows that are airing but not being covered here at Episodic Medium, paid subscribers can start their own threads in the Chat area on the Substack app.
Update: It’s 24 hours later and I finished the book. Enjoyed it!
Thanks for the shout out! I'm definitely pretty meh on the show overall, but I at least started having some fun with episodes 4-6 after a lot of boring prologuing in the first three.
Something I've always been fascinated by is that:
- the "fake oral history" print fiction format should, in theory, translate PERFECTLY into the "fake documentary" film/TV format, but...
- studios seem almost entirely unwilling to fully adapt these stories this way
I get it — the public perception/marketing conventions around a drama series/movie are just fundamentally different from documentary, and studios surely think there's more money/ratings/eyeballs in the former than the latter. But I still lament how much more gripping and interesting a fully-committed Daisy Jones "documentary" would be — just as how a "documentary" World War Z would have been infinitely more interesting than what that film ended up being (regardless of its merits, which it certainly has some).