Since Mad Men’s ending last year, I’ve been on the hunt for a new period piece to give my soul and procrastination time to. Vinyl, HBO’s new Martin Scorsese-Mick Jagger-Rich Cohen-Terrence Winter collaboration, seemed like a good candidate to fill said hole in my television-watching habits. However, the show falls a little flat and manages to feel out of place. The series’s pilot misrepresents what it’s trying to say about history; although set in the 1970s, it feels distinctly modern—the furniture, values, and narratives feel like they could be transposed to a modern drama. Vinyl gets caught up in its reflexivity, showing far too much of its creators’ influences and opinions, while trying to transform an era already coded into cultural memory.
On the surface, it feels a lot like it should complement Mad Men; it’s a similar NYC man-fest, set in the corporate world, making corporate takeover a major plot and story point. It’s a story of a fall from grace and (hopefully) redemption. Protagonist Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale), with his Connecticut, once-a-Factory-Girl wife, is a good approximation of Don Draper. However, Richie goes beyond Don-levels of self-destruction, and attempts not to womanise, but to remain young. Richie is Don at the end of Mad Men, a rock-bottom figure who must struggle to come back to prominence. Richie is improved by Cannavale’s strong acting skills and good sense of timing, but the audience doesn’t know Richie, and his seeming inability to cope and stay on the right path does not endear him to audiences. He feels weak, unlikable, and grossly out of touch. More than any error made by the director, cast, or crew, the pilot is weak because the back-story necessary to make characters feel like real, likeable people is denied, and the pilot does not end with any suggestion that the it plans to dive too deeply into Richie, beyond his job and the frivolity that accompanies it.
Vinyl is fun to watch. Scorsese fills the pilot with his visual style, using the rapid-zoom-pan a little too frequently throughout the pilot. Unfortunately, Scorsese’s characteristic preference for heavy dialogue makes this two-hour premiere hard to focus on, and particularly in a pilot, this comes as a little bit of a surprise. The emphasis on verbal humour makes the show feel imbalanced and runs counter to the lush visuals, while reducing its actors to talking heads. The episode consequently develops slowly, with stretches of dialogue punctuated by some visual flair. Undeniably, people looking for a series about music will be disappointed by Vinyl’s verbosity.
Despite its flaws, the pilot remains interesting for the questions it raises about its characters, as well as its creators. Juno Temple’s outspoken, pill-pushing A&R rookie Jamie is engaging, but reflects someone distinctly of the current decade than someone from the 1970s. Jamie, while dressed in glittery spandex jumpsuits, decidedly not from contemporary designers, feels distinctly like someone from our own decade. The show’s emphasis on Jamie’s autonomy seems to ignore and erase the sexism inherent to the industry, while also contradicting the literally orgasmic displays of sex that litter the episode. The contradictions work, though, and become one of the episode’s best and most interesting moments, allowing for a more reflexive view of both the decade and how the creators and writers see that decade in retrospect.
For audiences who lived through the 70s, this idea of what history looks like is questionable, and has been questioned in subsequent reviews. But for me, as someone who knows about the figures of the era but is distinctly removed from their sense of history, the series is pretty fascinating for the themes it develops. Undeniably, the pilot feels like a Scorsese movie, and carries with it a lot of his favourite things: drugs, sex, money, a tragic fall from grace, the opportunity for eventual redemption, NYC, alpha males—the list goes on. Vinyl, with its allusion-heavy plot, seems to effortlessly slip characters into this typically glamorous post-boho-pre-crime explosion New York City life. While Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire were never afraid to let their characters exist on the fringes of real history, Vinyl is trying to actually recreate and edit the past, inserting the unreal characters into a time where they feel out-of-place and intrusive.
Vinyl is making a high budget, intellectual-esque series about an era that epitomizes trash-culture, and something about that seems out of place. While the show does a good job simulating griminess and decay (shout-out to the Taxi Driver visual matches with the cabs and manhole steam), it crucially misses the experience of grime; the visceral feel of the show’s place within the history of New York is interested in the surface relationships among its characters, instead of its relationship to what history actually feels and looks like. While it sounds good, Vinyl’s pilot doesn’t progress beyond being a copy, determined to repeat the same purified, produced, and for-profit tones.
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