There are periodic talking-head interviews from a documentary being produced in 1997, which occasionally pit the recollections of one band alum against another, but all the Sixties and Seventies material is presented as objective truth, like it would be in a drama that lacks any kind of framing sequence. The TV show loses that Rashomon component. Was Billy an egomaniacal control freak threatened by Daisy’s arrival, or was Daisy an untrustworthy junkie whose erratic behavior demanded a firmer hand? And even if it’s a bit of both, how much weight should you give any one memory? It’s engaging and unpredictable, and the structure prevents what would otherwise be a very familiar story from falling into pure cliché. We’ve been inundated with real classic-rock oral histories over the years, and in this case, the format makes you constantly question who and what to believe. The first is that the book’s oral-history format - with Billy, Daisy, and the rest providing differing accounts of the Six’s tumultuous rise and fall - is an irresistible gimmick. But Daisy Jones & the Six has two fundamental problems it can only occasionally overcome. There are a lot of promising individual components, and some juicy drama. ![]() Teddy (Tom Wright) and the gang in ‘Daisy Jones & the Six.’ Lacey Terrell/Prime Video After they all - including Karen ( Suki Waterhouse), an English keyboard player recruited by a lovestruck Graham - experience various personal and professional travails, legendary record producer Teddy (Tom Wright) has the idea to put Daisy in the group, and magic happens - along with sexual tension, bitter arguments, substance abuse, and the rest of the package. Billy, meanwhile, assembles little brother Graham (Will Harrison) and Graham’s high school classmates Eddie and Warren into a band that he hopes will provide a way to escape Pittsburgh and some dark family memories of their own. Daisy grows up in Los Angeles feeling hopelessly alone in the home of her wealthy but unloving parents, and as an adult is used by men, with only closeted disco singer Simone (Nabiyah Be) seeing her as a person. The 10-episode miniseries has some excellent performances - particularly by Claflin and by Riley Keough, as Daisy - and other virtues beyond that, as it traces the intertwined lives of the two halves of its title. Like Eddie doing basic arithmetic, audiences may find that it’s hard to look at this TV version of Reid’s story without feeling like something is missing. ![]() But drummer Warren (Sebastian Chacon) argues that “the Five” would sound like too many other groups, including the Dave Clark Five and the Jackson 5. Bass player Eddie (Josh Whitehouse) rightly points out that people could find this inconsistency confusing. The name only arises because a sixth person - Camila ( Camila Morrone), wife of frontman Billy ( Sam Claflin) - is present during the brainstorm session. In Amazon Prime’s adaptation, the pre-Daisy incarnation of the band has one fewer member. ![]() The surviving musicians disagree on specifics, but all concur that it had to do with there being six people in the group at the time. In Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling novel Daisy Jones & the Six, an oral history of a fictional Seventies rock band that imploded at the height of its fame, we get conflicting accounts of how the band became known as the Six before the troubled Daisy joined as the seventh member.
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