“I don’t know if I do dig it. But I dig that you’re trying’”
- Lester Grimes
This past week, despite being announced for a second season shortly after it premiered, HBO pulled the plug on Vinyl, the Martin Scorsese/Mick Jagger helmed TV show that was every bit as pompous and arrogant as the era of rock’n'roll it pays homage to. The project had been in development since the ’80s, and when things finally started to move forward Terence Winter used his power as show runner to rush through Boardwalk Empire’s deeply flawed final season to help shape the Scorcese/Jagger vision to the small screen.
Everything about it seemed right. Scorsese’s manic vision for New York, set the same year he released Mean Streets, his first feature film. Jagger’s literal lifetime spent living as the definitive rock icon. And Winter as showrunner, who not only helmed Boardwalk Empire through good and bad years after being one of the pillars of The Sopranos writing room. Aside from the irksome way that Boardwalk was pushed out of the way, it seemed like a guaranteed smash hit.
Then came the pilot.
While I noted in my recap of that pilot that the two-hour run-time was a daunting obstacle that was bound to turn off casual viewers (it did), but aside of needing little fat trimmed, I still believe it was daring exhibitionist television. An angry, savage example of episodic television, occasionally bordering on arthouse, and defiantly re-writing the pre-dawn of punk-rock-era New York City.
By the season’s halfway point, the best explanation I was able to piece together was with a conversation with fellow Glide Magazine contributor Danielle Houtkooper during SXSW. I described it as that moment in Mean Streets when the POV suddenly goes Snorricam on Harvey Keitel’s Charlie Cappa while “Rubber Biscuit” plays at full volume. This was Scorsese’s deliberate untidiness, a stylistic change on every conceivable frequency that’s not set-up, explained, or accounted for.
Vinyl was a show constructed entirely for those moments, instead of just scattered throughout Scorsese’s body of work. Even throughout the nine episodes that followed the pilot, with other directors calling the shots, you could see his fingerprints all over every scene.
It was also around this halfway point that the show’s most glaring problem came to surface: it had buried its two best storylines. The story of Jamie (Juno Temple) lying her way into discovering the Nasty Bitz, and the story of Lester Grimes’ (Ato Essandoh) spiteful return to music, but this time as the band’s manager. Either of those two could have been the show’s main character.
One of them should have been. Instead we got Bobby Cannavale as Richie Finestra, a dynamite actor who all but stole Boardwalk’s third season as the big bad Gyp Rosetti, who felt… overexposed here. Even his character’s name was a little too over-the-top in a show that embellished itself with reckless abandon.
Had he been relegated to a supporting role, he could’ve, perhaps, evolved into the adversarial role he needed, instead of a rebranded, drug-addled anti-hero that was too hard to scrape together that much empathy for. Which is more a compliment to Cannavale’s skill as an actor if anything.
Still, some obvious oversights aside, most of the time Vinyl took chances, it paid off immensely. I interviewed Randall Poster, the show’s Music Supervisor, earlier this year, and he spoke at length about working with Scorsese and his layered intricacies that went into crafting the show’s soundtrack. Song’s dotted the show’s episodes like a treasure map, where finding the ‘X’ meant unlocking some kind of self-contained easter egg.
As Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley noted at the ATX TV Fest earlier this month, when Scorsese scores a single minute of film, you can have anywhere between 4 and 5 songs crammed into that time, which makes that minute of film epic in scope. When it came to building songs into the show’s story, Vinyl went as far to the edge as it could without going over. Songs took over scenes, with lookalike actors giving a full lip-sync performance, sometimes on the edge of a scene, sometimes take it over without warning.
It was an unprecedented way to tell a story, which meant it would alienate those that stuck around after a 122 minute pilot that ended with the collapse of a building around a New York Dolls show. The show was at its best when it would spotlight the lesser figures of rock’n'roll lore, like Ian Hart as Zeppelin manager Peter Hart storming into the offices of American Century Records. It would stumble immensely when it would hire actors to play the likes of Robert Plant to Robert Goblet, Alice Cooper to Elvis, almost feeling like it was trapping itself in a timeline it wanted to rewrite on its own terms.
Despite some misguided moments, Vinyl’s attempt to break the narrative form were nothing short of ambitious, and I’d like to think given time to grow, it might’ve been able to find its main characters and most compelling storylines. The Nasty Bitz finally coming together, with Jagger’s son, James, as the lead singer was just starting to take root. Looking back at its now one and only season, even though I didn’t like everything about Vinyl, I dug that it was trying.
The post ‘But I Dig That You’re Tryin’ – An Open Letter To ‘Vinyl’ appeared first on Glide Magazine.
