my Daisy Jones obsession (beware: spoilers)
SPOILER ALERT… If you haven’t read or watched Daisy Jones and the Six, this post contains a lot of spoilers.
(Go read it, then watch it, then come back to me!)
Okay. So Daisy Jones and the Six was one of my very favorite books that I read in 2022. It is fucking BRILLIANT.
If you haven’t read it (what are you waiting for?!) - the entire book is structured like a documentary. So it’s told in retrospect - the main characters are all talking about the events of the book for a documentary, thirty-plus years later.
I have absolutely no idea how Taylor Jenkins Reid pulled that off. It is MASTERFUL. It should not work, BUT IT DOES. I bow down to her genius.
Then I watched the limited series show, which is now available on Amazon Prime. IT IS SO GOOD. They fully did justice to the book.
Here are some thoughts on what worked and didn’t work in the adaptation:
First of all, I totally forgot Peter was even a character in the book (he doesn’t make it onscreen and they make Camila the honorary sixth band member). Didn’t miss him, carry on!
The casting is just brilliant. Riley Keough as Daisy - genius. Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne - genius. Camila Morrone as Camila Dunne - GENIUS. Everyone was casted perfectly. I saw some complaints on the internet about Karen having a British accent - in the book, she doesn’t, and people were complaining that the show was trying too hard to be Fleetwood Mac. Get over it, people!
The music. OH MY GOD THE MUSIC. I have been playing the album on Spotify on repeat for a month. First of all, I was ridiculously impressed with how far Reid went in the book - she describes the band’s album, Aurora, in detail. She wrote lyrics to every song on it - for the book, way before the show even existed. SO GOOD.
Episode 5, when Daisy and Billy collaborate and write together, is my absolute favorite. I need to go back and watch it again. The magic of the creative process at work… what we see later is the unraveling (i.e. what happens when you don’t tend to yourself in the process of making amazing work), but this is my fave.
I was disappointed in the show’s depiction of the album’s cover photo. In the book, Reid describes the photo shoot in detail and I could picture the album perfectly. I don’t like the image they ended up with in the show, and I thought Camila being there broke the spell a little bit - in the book, the band is still in a cocoon at that point.
I was kinda bitter about episode 7 - while Daisy does escape to Greece in the book, and she does marry a prince of some kind (can’t remember the exact details), and Simone does end up rescuing her in the book (which doesn’t quite play out the same way in the show), we did NOT need an entire episode in Greece. It felt like total filler to me. Though I did love the moment (which is maybe in episode 8) when Nick and Daisy are in a cab driving through Hollywood and one of the new songs comes on the radio and he says, “Is this you? … Just how famous are you?”
The ending… I CRIED. When Julia says off camera, “I remember more than you think, Dad.” I BROKE DOWN. They totally did the ending justice and I love that Daisy and Billy meet again. So beautiful.
Let your obsession with shows, books, music, art, whatever… fuel your work.
Don’t just consume.
Go deep into the obsession, and also ask yourself: how can I infuse this energy into my own creative work?
Then go do that.
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