I finally finished watching season 1 of Vinyl, HBO’s series focusing on the music scene in New York, circa early-/mid-’70s. It arrived with a lot hype — much of which has proven to be undeserved. In the end, it probably was better than its reviews. (Updated: HBO cancels Vinyl.)
Here are my thoughts:
1. Vinyl is visually and aurally alluring, but ultimately empty. Even as its nods to grassroots musical movements of the early ’70s, it has more in common with the bloated stadium rock the punk, disco and other underground movements were reacting to.
2. The name-dropping is ineffective and undercuts efforts at creating something more than just a period piece. I get that the producers, directors and writers are seeking authenticity, but the constant mention of rock’s pantheon (and others famous at the time) has the same effect that your uncle’s boasting that he knows a guy has — go ahead, roll your eyes.
3. When the show opts to include the famous in the narrative as characters — David Bowie, Robert Plant, Andy Warhol — it suspends our suspension of disbelief.
4. It traffics too much in nostalgia. See 2 and 3. The terrible ABC comedy, The Goldbergs, uses a concept it calls ’80-something to create a sensibility and collapse an entire decade into a single moment — a tactic that does nothing more than cast a complicated decade simplistically as the sum of the clothing, music and film loved by teen America. This is what I mean by nostalgia — collapsing complexities into a simple narrative that connects with a rosy sense of a time in our past.
Vinyl does this, even as it portrays the flawed hedonism of the time, even as it rolls out examples of the darkness within.
5. It glorifies drug abuse. I’m not being prudish — I support most legalization and decriminalization efforts — but the excesses that left a trail of bodies across the decade are not given a weight equivalent to the excitement of hedonistic libertinism.
6. Too much Richie, which leaves some truly interesting personalities struggling for air. More focus needed to be given to Lester, Zak, Jamie and Devon.
7. The female characters are either underused (see 6) or caricatures. Andrea’s strong woman is portrayed one-sidedly as a ball-buster without humanity — which may have been a role strong women had to play at the time, at least publicly, but it also lacks nuance and is pure stereotype.
8. There are too many stretches of what is best called “masturbatory filmmaking” — or visual flourishes that lack function. This contributes to pacing issues and some boring stretches.
9. The murder narrative feels tacked on.
10. And yet, it was oddly compelling. Maybe I’m just a sucker for the music, or maybe it’s just the equivalent of rubbernecking a car crash, but I can’t say for sure that I won’t return for season two.
Hank Kalet 