'Daisy Jones and The Six' is Marvel for the girlies

Reese Witherspoon, you've dashed my dreams of the Taylor Jenkins Reid Cinematic Universe, and I only forgive you because you gave me 'Legally Blonde'.

Riley Keough is not a nepo baby. Calling her one is tantamount to slander. She is a nepo PRINCESS. Her bright eyes, shiny hair and creamy skin radiate like the showbiz blue blood she is. Her genetic proximity to greatness blessed her with a certain sparkle. If you live under a rock, Keough’s maternal grandfather, whom she never met because he died on the toilet aged 42 in 1977, was ELVIS PRESLEY! Her grandad is not even where the buck stops for her pop culture pedigree, but it's enough. How I feel about Keough is how I imagine royalists feel about Prince William when they are all, ‘oh, he has his Granny’s dedication to serving his country’, but instead of maintaining an institution built on inbreeding and inequality, I honour those born to entertain, a far nobler prospect. 

My first dive into Keough’s work is her starring role in the Amazon Prime Video mini-series ‘Daisy Jones and the Six’, as the titular character, who is obviously modelled on Stevie Nicks, but resembles a yassified Florence Welch. Like everything else nowadays, the show is a wonder that people are mistakenly taking too seriously. Please, it’s enough! 

Catch me in the right mood; I will opine how television is the greatest medium how HBO, its apex, delivers greats like ‘The Sopranos’, ‘The White Lotus’, and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ and so on. However,  sometimes good taste (and Now TV) doesn’t scratch that hard-to-reach itch. Sometimes only leaning into so-called trash TV will. Sometimes you need content cosplaying as frivolous glamour, like this simulacrum of a supposedly genre-defining 70s band, to hit that spot. 

The scratch is quite satisfying from this accidentally funny number, which fails, both sexually and musically, to commit to its Fleetwood Mac bit. In the best possible way, ‘Daisy Jones’ is nonsense, walking in the footsteps of ‘Emily in Paris’. But instead of a bubblegum culture clash, it’s a poor man’s ‘Almost Famous’ rip-off.

There are so many questions that I do not want answers to! Don’t tell me why the group starts life as the Dunne Brothers when its peak percentage of brothers Dunne only ever stood at 40. No one explain the difference between the two men in the band that aren’t Sam Claflin or the fellow with the Mario Brothers tash? I don’t care!

 Critics, what did you expect? Anyone over the age of 13 who thought it would be good, like a quality piece of telly, is either incredibly naive or never read the source material, a documentary transcript posing as a novel. The book, which is like a literature-induced lobotomy, forms the second instalment of what music journalist Emma Wilkes and her sister refer to as the Taylor Jenkins Reid Cinematic Universe, which began with 2017’s ‘The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo’, a retrospective of an Old Hollywood starlet’s life. ‘Daisy Jones’, which was published in 2019, came next.  2021’s ‘Malibu Rising’ is my favourite, while the last year’s ‘Carrie Soto is Back’ was underwhelming. The quartet of historical fiction are pages and pages of glittery drivel. All are getting their own movie or TV adaption,  aside from ‘Carrie Soto’, but that seems like a matter of time. Currently, though, I’m raging at Reese Witherspoon, who split up my babies when she just scooped up the rights for ‘Daisy Jones’, dashing my dreams of a Marvel for the Gals, Gay and Theys. We don’t want a network of superheroes; we want Mick Riva’s mischief. 

Hollywood’s sexism strikes again!