Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll

It lurches in tone and an accelerated narrative that seems at times to leave holes in the storytelling, gaps that draw you up short where you should be just be sailing along. Still, if it's a bit of a mess, it's not an uninteresting one.

A little of Leary goes a long way with me these days, but there are enough other elements here (the supporting cast also includes Bobby Kelly, John Ales and Elaine Hendrix as former Heathens reuniting to be part of the Gigi project) to potentially sample. But the father/daughter stuff is just too much.

The pluses of the show include watching Leary have a good time and seeing the way the cast gels around him.... Other TV series set in the music business--“Nashville,” “Empire”--have a lot more genre awareness and seem to make the characters’ enthusiasm believable enough. But on Sex&Drugs, even the costumes appear generic and unrealized.

Mr. Leary is trying to do something here that gets at the raunch and joy of the rock lifestyle but also offers a serious consideration of its consequences. He ends up not doing either very well.

S&D&R&R has several things going for it that make it passably enjoyable, including some funny dialogue, good performances and, of course, Leary’s trademark grumpy charm.

There’s potential here for a sharp sitcom about a man who’s kept aging but stopped growing. But too often Sex&Drugs shares Johnny’s arrested development, at the expense of both relevance and comedy.

With this vague sensibility and some outdated ideas about the music industry, Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll becomes the very thing Johnny claims to loathe most: It is inauthentic and forgettable.

Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll smells suspiciously like a vanity project that sat on Leary's shelf for a couple of decades.

As a music-industry story, Sex & Drugs is confused and outdated, with irritating, one-dimensional characters and self-consciously edgy humor. Like its protagonist, it’s mostly a sad relic straining to appear hip.

It’s a half-baked argument for the necessity of rock.

A warm family sitcom Sex&Drugs is not. Neither is it a very funny sitcom.