Daisy Jones & The Six

“Daisy Jones” features exceptional performances throughout, but there are a few standouts — a never-been-better Claflin, a mercurial Keough and an entrancing Morrone. It all makes for one Amazon Prime’s best series yet. But heed these words of advice: Episode 10 will wreck you when it drops that mic.

The way Daisy Jones & The Six explores the price of fame, the price of dreams, and the price of artistry is really captivating, and showcases the true cost better than most real biopics manage to.

Olyphant's costume-rack theatricality signposts Daisy Jones' excessive charm. The 10-part miniseries starts absurd, turns sneakily profound, and lands in schmaltz so soapy I had to wipe tears from my eyes.

The ensemble clearly had lots of fun together, which translates to a delightful viewing experience. And the ’70s-era costumes and set design draw the audience into its world of sex, drugs, and, yes, rock ’n’ roll. Most especially, the love story at the center is compelling enough that viewers won’t want to miss a moment of its highs and lows. Much like its titular fictional band, Daisy Jones & The Six is destined to be a crowd-pleaser.

Sometimes there’s absolutely nothing wrong in playing the classics, and what the TV series lacks in ambition or originality, it more than makes up for in sheer dramatic heft, showstopping original songs, and an ensemble cast that’s virtually note-perfect across the board.

“Daisy Jones & the Six” doesn’t quite qualify as a dream come true, but it does turn its fictional story into a four-star soap, wistfully capturing this musical era broadly and the sometimes-fleeting nature of stardom.

While the series may be criticized for a certain rose-colored approach to rock’s manipulation, selfishness and self-destruction, its fundamental good humor is quite compelling. Imperfect and fault-ridden like the people it depicts, “Daisy Jones & the Six” has a hard-earned forgiving heart that may leave you a blubbering mess.

Amazon’s Daisy Jones & the Six is hampered by rock star clichés, but it captures a vibrant creative spark that’s hard to resist.

There’s a chance the folks who enjoy the adaptation of Daisy Jones & the Six the most will be the ones who are experiencing the story for the first time. While book-to-screen adaptations certainly don’t have to follow story beats to a tee in order to be successful, some of the more drastic changes here don’t feel in service of the central narrative.

“Daisy Jones & the Six” takes what works in the best-selling novel and smartly makes minor adjustments to the material where needed.

The [dramamentary] format doesn’t always work, especially later in the series when the confessional interviews are fewer and farther between, but still: It’s a different approach that gives everything a bit of a zhuzh as the action leaps between then and now, and what people say now and what we see actually happened then.

As a TV series, it’s perfectly fine, in a paradoxically low-wattage, high-intensity way, though it does go on a little long and requires some willful suspension of disbelief.

A series that’s alternately a pantomime pastiche and a fond and stirring tribute. Nonetheless, if the series demands that one wade through some early clunkers, it’s ultimately worth it for a back-half that’s at least as much killer as filler.

The show looks and sounds polished, beautifully capturing the earth-toned aesthetics of the era and producing an impressive album of earworms. But it’s a sun-kissed misfire that reduces what could have been a fascinating look at the profundity of artistic connection to a shallow soap opera.

“Daisy Jones & the Six” is too concerned about being cool instead of finding the true currency underneath the façade of rock history.

It’s a good series, well-acted, competently scripted. But it just doesn’t quite rock.

It's a musical drama about the slightly-damaged individuals in this fictional rock band and it does tackle themes like addiction, harassment, and discrimination — but all with a very light touch.

Although the series gains more heft after Billy gets out of rehab, and more torque once Daisy arrives, Daisy Jones & the Six never properly comes to life. It’s all a little too slick and sanitary.

Solid, if slightly underwhelming – but Riley Keough’s star quality leaps off the screen, and there is many a magical musical moment.

While Daisy Jones & The Six successfully brings the book’s characters and music to life, pacing-wise, it suffers from a similar problem as Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy.

Rather than expanding this universe, the detours into Simone’s storyline do more to spotlight its limits. It becomes easier to imagine the more sweeping saga this could have been.

Though the Amazon version of Daisy Jones is very watchable, it also never finds its own equivalent secret ingredient to push it over the top.

Although the era is reconstructed with lavish attention to detail, there’s no shunning the impression that these are beautiful actors cosplaying Seventies-style hedonism. ... Yet at its best Daisy Jones & The Six portrays the spine-tingling Dionysian thrill of musical collaboration.

Daisy’s personality is huge, but it’s not just the band over which she’s running roughshod — it’s the show. As a delivery system for two compelling performances, “Daisy Jones & the Six” is well worth watching. But I craved more moments in which it might really sing.

With a better script, a looser concept and fewer episodes, Daisy Jones and The Six could have been something really special. In its worst moments, however, it’s a banal, thin love story without enough grit or cool laissez-faire to emulate what makes seventies rock bands so fascinating. Unlike many rockstars of the era, I’m glad there won’t be a reunion tour.

The whole thing lacks a certain crackle, its sepia palette begging for literal and figurative color.

In this fictionalized spin on Fleetwood Mac, Riley Keough (grandkid of King Elvis) does herself proud, rocking out like Stevie Nicks on the sexy, druggy ‘70s LA music scene. Too bad the series itself quickly descends from bruising rock aria to sappy emo-ballad.

There’s enough musical archeology to all of this, the LA “Sunset Strip” scene with The Troubadour, recording studios and the like, the band’s first “stick together” vows after we’ve heard them stumble through “House of the Rising Sun,” to keep some folks interested.

The music – and there is a whole album's worth of original songs – is fun if lacking depth, like everything else in the series. Try as it might, "Daisy" can't create an evocative story out of nostalgia, electric guitars and pretty people.

For all the series’ delights — the chemistry between Sam Claflin and Riley Keough, the constant scene-stealing by Camila Morrone, the fizziness of the original songs — there’s an unignorable smallness throughout, a sense that, as with that Fleetwood Mac T-shirt, we’re settling for a copy of a copy.

The series falls into a number of expected traps. It’s the “same old tired rock and roll tale,” as Billy puts it, and he’s not wrong. But the episodes have a cumulative power, even if the storytelling often feels like it’s cutting corners rather than digging in.

Sure, it’s serviceable as a decent binge for people who get off on reading about how much Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham hated each other, but at no point does it even come close to the heights reached by the original novel, ones that went past the simple shock value of overdoses and infidelity and whatever else the writers of the show could scrounge up.

Daisy Jones & The Six is so tepid and deliberately inoffensive it almost becomes the opposite. To even dimly invoke the legacy of Fleetwood Mac in service of something so wan and lifeless—stuck in a no man’s land between melodrama soap and wistful epic drama—is almost a vulgarity. Though, that’s probably too strong a word to describe a series that is, essentially, the TV equivalent of muzak.

"Daisy" will find an audience, though its lazy reliance on '70s counter-cultural clichés and apocryphal stories grows tiresome.

It’s disappointing that “Daisy Jones” mostly falls back on rock ‘n’ roll clichés and shameless melodrama.

The series is more hollow and hackneyed than the novel. ... Daisy Jones does hit a few high notes. Keough grounds what could’ve been an ethereal sad girl in intelligence and drive—but in a choice that suggests A Star Is Born was on the show’s mood board, Claflin’s Billy is nothing but a human wince.