This review contains spoilers. Read at your own discretion.
Sex, drugs, and love: the beating heart of 1970s rock n’ roll pulses through Amazon Prime’s new series Daisy Jones and The Six.
The 10-episode drama is based on the novel of the same title by author Taylor Jenkins Reid, whose oral history storytelling style allows her to capture the '70s scene almost as if she were clubbing on the sunset strip with Daisy herself.
Reid, however, isn’t a stranger to traveling through time with her storytelling. Her past four books have been about a quartet of famous women living in interlocked worlds, with each novel touching on a different decade and woman: Evelyn Hugo in the '60s, Daisy Jones in the '70s, Nina Riva in the '80s, and Carrie Soto in the '90s. The novels, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Daisy Jones and the Six, Malibu Rising, and Carrie Soto Is Back, all detail women in the spotlight who are struggling with their own personal demons and searching to find themselves both in and out of the public eye.
The novel Daisy Jones and the Six is told through a series of interviews rather than traditional prose, and focuses on the rise and fall of a world-famous 1970s rock band: Daisy Jones and The Six. Reid’s choice of format provides a unique authenticity to the characters' words.
"I wanted you to feel immersed in it, and not like you were reading fiction, but like you were there. For me, the best way to do that was to mimic what I would argue is the best medium for stories about rock, which is a rock documentary,” Reid said of her style choice in an interview with Rolling Stone. “I wanted it to feel like an episode of Behind the Music, as if you were hearing it from the people directly. That there was no filter. The conclusion I came to was that it had to be an oral history.”
When you put this book down, you will probably find yourself searching the internet for the actual Daisy Jones and The Six, because it is almost impossible to believe that these characters aren’t real, breathing people. While the story is, unfortunately, fictional, Reid was heavily inspired by the very real and historically influential band Fleetwood Mac.
“When I decided I wanted to write a book about rock ‘n’ roll, I kept coming back to that moment when Lindsey watched Stevie sing ‘Landslide,'” Reid wrote in an essay for Hello Sunshine, as reported by Time. “How it looked so much like two people in love. And yet, we’ll never truly know what lived between them. I wanted to write a story about that, about how the lines between real life and performance can get blurred, about how singing about old wounds might keep them fresh.”
The echoes of this are felt throughout much of the TV series, where the lead characters and singers of the band, Billy Dunne and Daisy Jones, are tangled in complicated feelings of love, lust and regret. For Reid, this resonates with the idea of fame and passion that she has intertwined so tightly through her quartet of women.
“I finished the book that I wrote before this one, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, and I thought when I was done with that book, that it meant that I had to be done writing about famous women,” she said in the same Rolling Stone article. “But I felt drawn to the idea of artistic collaborators, people who are blurring the line between what is real life and what is art. This idea that — and it happens a lot with music — that you have a man and woman singing together, and it becomes sort of unclear, certainly to the audience: Is this a performance or is this real?”
This idea of magic being created onstage is so clear in the book that readers have been itching for years to hear Aurora, the album that began the Daisy Jones phenomenon. Now, they can.
Producer Blake Mills spearheaded the process of creating the Aurora album as a writer and producer, recruiting songwriters such as Phoebe Bridgers and Marcus Mumford to co-write the songs imagined in the novel. While many fans have been disappointed that the lyrics and song titles on the released album don’t match the Aurora penned by Reid herself, Showrunner Scott Neustadter explains that this was a necessary choice to make.
“If we were going to get these songwriters to contribute music and to write within the strict parameters we needed them to, we couldn’t tell them that they had to use previously written lyrics,” Neustadter said. “You can’t just ask for a melody when you’re talking to Blake Mills, Phoebe Bridgers, Jackson Browne and Marcus Mumford.”
While the album had a lot of pressure on the songs, the show itself was another beast to tackle. The enormous fanbase from the book is an intimidating presence, but this isn’t Neustadter’s first experience spearheading a project with this kind of weight. The Daisy Jones showrunner has previously worked on The Fault in Our Stars, The Spectacular Now and Paper Towns.
One of the key instruments in the show is the setting, with the 1970s LA rock scene almost becoming a character in itself. Infusing the show with the aura of this iconic era required a lot of research.
During production, the team effectively shut down the Sunset Strip, an almost 2-mile stretch of iconic boutiques, restaurants and nightclubs, making sure that The Whiskey and The Troubadour you see on-screen are the real places themselves. They also ensured that the scenes in which the band is recording their album in the studio had a special purpose as well.
"Instead of shooting in a sound stage at the Paramount lot for the studio recording sessions, we actually shot where they recorded the first Fleetwood Mac album just to get the ghosts,” Neustadter said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “I think it translates, and I know the actors felt it.”
While the oral history-telling of the book gave the story unique layers of detail for readers, it left a lot of gaps to be filled in by the series' screenwriters. Due to the fact that each character is telling their story from memory, there are lies and truths interwoven to paint a picture of what might have happened, but not what actually happened. Although fans have noticed plenty of changes from the book to the screen, many of these are due to the creative decisions required to fill in what the characters in the book leave out.
“I loved that it’s being told through memory, because you can never trust the memory. We had to make a decision pretty early on that what we’re watching in the flashbacks is what happened. It’s not anyone’s interpretation of events. It’s not anyone's point of view. It is real,” Neustadter said to The Hollywood Reporter. “The book could get away with not answering some questions that I think we had to answer.”
Of the changes that were made, one that stands out is the physical intimacy in the romance between Daisy and Billy. In the novel, the tension between the two is consistently high but there is a very clear line that is never crossed: Daisy and Billy never do anything. In episode 6 of the series, however, we see that line broken in a pivotal kiss scene prior to recording one song on the record. The pair kiss again in the finale episode as well.
As a reader of the book, the decision to have these two characters physically involved was a shock due to the novel’s emphasis on the fact that nothing between the two happened, ever. Showrunner Will Graham explains that the choice to enhance Daisy and Billy's relationship beyond a purely emotional connection is a way of showcasing the vagueness, inaccuracy, and unreliability of memory that can stem from a story told solely through first-hand accounts. We aren’t shown what actually happened in the book, only what Daisy and Billy claim to have done. And they could be lying.
“We realized early on that the book is telling you what Daisy and Billy and the rest of the band are willing to say, but there are moments when you really feel that things are sort of purposefully left ambiguous or people have different memories and different versions of what happened,” Graham said. “And looking at it 20 years later, it’s a little messier and it’s a little more romantic.”
The relationship between Daisy and Billy isn’t the only storyline that became a little messier in the show. Camila Dunne, a character who comes off as very saintly and “good” in the novel, takes on a new arc that colors her character gray in a way that is more realistic and plausible. As the wife of Billy Dunne, Camila has been through a lot: she watches him cheat on her, suffer through addiction, embark on the road to rehab, miss the birth and first few months of life of his daughter and fall in love with Daisy Jones. And yet, she stays. She gives him another chance.
In the novel, we hear her perspective and see that she has stayed despite. The series, however, gives her a purpose. As the band’s photographer, Camila becomes a member of the band itself and pursues her passion alongside her husband. We also witness the series expose her own vulnerabilities and challenges, most notably during the episode in which she has a one-time affair with a member of the band after suspecting that Daisy and Billy are romantically involved.
“In the book, Camila just seems so pure and so good, but you have these little passages where she talks about meeting her friend for lunch and Billy says, ‘Oh, nobody has a lunch that’s as long as that one,’ and it just felt like on the periphery of the storytelling is a whole Camila life that we aren’t seeing in the book,” Neustadter said. “I think all these relationships were super messy, but there’s no good guy and there’s no bad guy. There’s just real people making decisions that they have to live with afterwards.”
With Camila taking a more prominent role in the band, another shocking change was the elimination of Pete Loving, The Six’s bassist and sixth member, from the series’ band. Instead, Camila takes his place and makes the five musicians “The Six.”
Neustadter explains that he wanted to ensure that all band members were fleshed out fully, and the minor characters in the novel, Producer Teddy Price and Disco Pioneer Simone Jackson, get larger arcs of their own. As a member of The Six who doesn’t speak much in the novel -- and is largely uninvolved with most drama -- the showrunners decided to remove Pete.
As Neustadter said, the storyline for the novel’s minor character Simone Jackson changes immensely in the series. While in the book her role is to primarily be “Daisy Jones’ Best Friend,” she takes on a life of her own on the screen. We see Simone travel to New York, struggle with her sexuality at a time when queer women weren’t accepted in the music industry and fight to remain a good friend to Daisy through it all.
“We wanted to explore what it meant to be a queer Black woman in the world in that moment in time,” Neustadter said. “What would have to be compromised, what would have to be hidden? And especially in the world of disco, which is so much about freedom and expression, that dichotomy was very interesting to us. We also really wanted to make sure that she was her own character, not someone whose only function was guiding Daisy’s story.” This new sense of agency for Simone is shown through several episodes highlighting her character specifically, allowing viewers to connect with her in a way that transcends the novel.
With several characters having stronger arcs throughout the series, the pressure to do the ending justice must have been even more immense. The series concluded very similarly to the book, where each character explains what they have been up to over the last 20 years in a “where are they now?” sequence. In an emotional final few minutes, we see Billy and Julia interacting in present time as Julia displays a message Camila had left for Billy and Daisy: to give each other a call after she has passed on.
In the novel, Camila's final wish is all that readers are left with. The series, however, satisfies the many questions readers have asked since turning that last page. The very final shots of the series show Billy knocking on Daisy’s door, and just as Camila would have wanted, she answers it. While the book may have made readers emotional, the series had many in tears. The choice to bring these characters face-to-face again, as well as television's ability to showcase them in visuals on the screen, amplifies the emotional impact of the ending.
Although Reid’s quartet of famous women wrapped up with Carrie Soto Is Back, which was released at the end of August 2022, the release of the Amazon Prime series has opened a whole new door to the “TJR Universe,” a phrase many fans refer to describe Reid's latest four novels. In each book, characters from the other novels make appearances, stringing a sense of authenticity throughout the fictional world.
As news of a potential tour rises for the cast of Daisy Jones and The Six, the line between real and fictional blurs even more. Daisy Jones and The Six is beginning to feel like a band simply wiped from the memory of society, much like The Beatles in the movie Yesterday, with the novel, series and album our only ways back to remembering them.
Real or not, the Amazon Prime series based on Reid's novel is a guaranteed wild ride through the height of 1970s rock 'n roll that will have you tapping your feet to the soaring voices and beat of Daisy Jones and The Six.
