by Larry Brody
THE GOOD:
- Gotta love the look, filled with energy and chaos
- The ’70s setting
- The talent attached to the project – Mick Jagger! Martin Scorsese! Ray Romano! Olivia Wilde!
THE NOT SO GOOD:
- The dated, bullshit rock ‘n’ roll cinematography that we’ve seen in every film – and terrible TV episode from the ’70s to today
- The cliche that the ’70s have become
- Mick Jagger! Martin Scorsese! Men of talent who stopped making anywhere near full use of that talent long ago
OVERALL:
- As we would have said in the ’70s, here’s the thing. The ’70s music scene genuinely was a time of excess and outrageousness. The real deal, spontaneous and filled with a combination of greed, narcissism and idealism that is unimaginable today…even to those who lived it.
This amazing energy became perverted almost immediately by being co-opted for episodes of shows like THE BOLD ONES, BARNABY JONES, CANNON, THE INTERNS, you-name-it, primetime network TV shows that by their very nature were forbidden to show what was really happening and what caused it, instead presenting a cleaned up and way-too-coherent facsimile suitable for flyover country viewing. I know this because I wrote a ton of those episodes for various shows and every single one of them was diluted into silly, bell-bottomed plastic by the time it appeared on NBC, CBS, or ABC.
Today, TV has changed. Not matured, as so many people keep claiming, just changed…so that instead of showing the bright side the audience is treated to the dark side instead. VINYL gives us the dark side of the music business, minus the love and the dedication and the hopefulness that the ’70s were, from my perspective, all about. It presents every cliche in the ugliest possible way, spitting in our faces like a sack of Johnny Rottens hocking lugies out at the ’80s audiences. (Because spitting was a punk ’80s thang, y’all.)
I’ve tried to watch this show, but I just can’t. Its sheer creative laziness fills me with disappointment and genuine outrage. All I can think, when I think about this series is, “Oh, Christ, is this what my children think my youth was all about? And my grandkids, what can they be imagining I was all about back in the day?”
Screw you, Vinyl. You’re so bad you make 8-Track cassettes look good.
