There’s a moment about halfway through Daisy Jones & the Six, Amazon’s sprawling adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling book, in which the show achieves the emotional jolt it so often mimes. It’s the mid-1970s, and the Six, a combustible rock band loosely inspired by Fleetwood Mac, are performing at a music festival in Hawaii; Daisy Jones (Riley Keough), the ethereal Stevie Nicksian singer-songwriter who helped deliver the band’s first hit, is supposed to join them four songs in. But she jumps the gun, traipsing on stage after the opener on pills and a swig of whiskey, much to the chagrin of territorial frontman Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin).
It’s a rare unpredictable scene in a show rife with rock’n’roll cliches and 70s facsimiles. The ensuing rendition of Look at Us Now (Honeycomb), a clear homage to Fleetwood’s The Chain that did get stuck in my head for several days, was palpably stressful, in the way that people being chaotic and potentially embarrassing in front of other people makes me immediately reach for the pause button. There’s a shiver of excitement – not for the music, which is just fine, nor for the first “performance” of Daisy Jones & the Six, which plays out as you’d expect (serviceable to us, catnip to the fans) and which band members promptly tell us was special, but for a fleeting glimpse of the mercurial, magnetic, destabilizing thing that is star power.
