Daisy Jones & The Six TV Show Review: A Story of the Most Famous Fake Rock Band in the World

Daisy Jones & The Six is an Amazon Prime TV show based on the book of the same name (by Taylor Jenkins Reid) about a fictional rock band that is both amazing and dysfunctional at the same time. It’s a story about musicians in the late 1970s as they find their voice and rise to stardom. If you enjoy stories about talented people coming together to make magic happen, but also inevitably clashing, you will enjoy this show!

I wasn’t a huge fan of the book because the story is told through a series of interviews. It feels really disjointed when six different people are sharing their perspectives. And to be honest, the characters are not particularly likable. One of the resounding themes throughout this show is that a one-of-a-kind creative mind can bring about success and fame. But genius comes at a cost and this show is riddled with the human follies of drug abuse, alcoholism, and adultery.

The TV show takes the novel and makes it better, in my opinion. I think the interview format works when it’s in a TV show, because even though the characters are being interviewed from a future point in time, the viewers can see the narrative of the story being played out in a linear way. This makes it feel a lot less disjointed and much easier to understand the dynamics of each character as they interact with each other.

The TV show helped bring this story to life by actually inserting music into the experience. Reading the lyrics to a song does not feel as impactful to me as listening to the actual song. I’m sure some people can find the meaningfulness behind song lyrics because they are poetic. But putting melodies to the lyrics can create a much more memorable and heartfelt storytelling experience. I could really appreciate that this show brought to life the songs of the book and created an actual soundtrack.

I think that Riley Keough and Sam Claflin absolutely killed it as Daisy Jones and Billy Dunne. Keough really embodies the free-spirited essence of Daisy. Her voice is also really amazing and I think it’s incredible that both Keough and Claflin were singing the songs.

I happened to re-watch The Hunger Games randomly before I started this series and I can’t unsee the Finnick Odair from Sam Claflin. Other than the fact that he looks way too old to be playing the role of Billy Dunne, I thought that Claflin did an incredible job embodying the conflicted, cocky, and broken role of Billy. I had moments of immense hatred and sympathy for that character.

While the journey of this fictional band was rocky and wild, I was really satisfied by the ending. Without giving anything away, I think that the heart of the show really lies with the relationship between Daisy and Billy. And the way their story ends leaves it both satisfying and open-ended. I also heard rumors about there possibly being a Season 2. It would be exciting to see, if the story continues, how the show can take the book into completely new territories and not be bound by the book’s narrative.