“Vinyl,” a new HBO series that premieres on February 14, is about music: specifically, music from the past, as its title suggests, and even more specifically, rock ’n’ roll. Unfortunately, what it claims to be about is what it often gets most incorrect. The late-’70s rock ’n’ roll spirit they are attempting to capture is one that is lazy with historical specificity, allowing for a booze, sex, and all-night party mythology that has been regurgitated over and over through many layers of the popular imagination to dominate.It also doesn’t help that there is confusion about what “Vinyl” is actually trying to be. In some ways, it is two shows. The first is about music history and the relationship between money and creativity; in particular, the fascinating intertwining of mob related activity and the recording industry, a relationship of bribes and shadow funding and the threat of violence. The second is a crime thriller, inevitably dealing with those same people and the threat of violence becoming real. These two shows — the product, perhaps, of two of its creators, Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger — presented as one single unit doesn’t always come together in a cohesive way. The crime thriller piece often feels like it was added in to provide an extra narrative drive to the behind-the-scenes mechanics of the music industry, which appeals to a decidedly smaller audience. The result is something that feels disjointed.This doesn’t mean it’s not fun to watch. There is a lot happening in “Vinyl,” and each episode chaotically moves in various different directions (the pilot clocks in at close to two hours, and still feels unfinished). All the plotlines revolve around Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale), a record executive who is in the process of selling his label, American Century, to German buyers. The entire deal hinges on a promise they’ve made to sign Led Zeppelin, which falls apart when the band finds out that Richie tried to stiff them on their percentage of profits. The staff is worried about what will happen to them when the company is sold, but most of them can’t see that the reason the label is not as successful as it once was is because they’re not chasing new acts — success has made them complacent. But Jamie (June Temple), an ambitious drug-dealing assistant at the label who bristles under the misogyny of her male coworkers, decides to push the company into the future by attempting to sign a new punk band called The Nasty Bits. At the same time, Richie’s wife, Devon (Olivia Wilde), is also thinking about the future. A former muse to Andy Warhol (played with a surprising amount of personality by John Cameron Mitchell), she is stuck in the suburbs looking after their children, waiting for the day that Richie gets out of the business and leaves behind all the temptations that go along with it. Then there is the crime element, clearly indebted to the work of Scorsese (who directed the pilot), which informs the other parts of the show while remaining, at first strangely, at a distance.It is this constant motion between distance and detail that, ultimately, makes “Vinyl” infuriating. Between its overzealous narrative and oscillating modes of genre, the show will, in one moment, reference a specific event — say, the collapse of the Mercer Arts Centre, a central venue for underground music of the period — while at the same time offer no explanation for why an unknown British band called The Nasty Bits, who sound an awful lot like the Sex Pistols, would be performing for packed crowds at least one year before the Ramones ever set foot in CBGB. The show wants fact and fiction to coincide, but the facts are often so wrong that you wish they just made the entire thing up. What you’re left with is muddled myth.
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