Yesterday HBO announced the cancellation of Vinyl, the prestigious and expensive show from Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, and Terence Winter. This didn’t come as a huge surprise to anyone, as Vinyl received mixed reviews and struggled to find an audience. I liked the show, for the most part, although I can understand why people were disappointed by it; the show offered virtually no element of realism, but instead functioned as a sort of fantasia of 1970s mythological excess, with sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll being treated like holy relics. There were some really good performances—I loved Ray Romano’s sad-sack promotions guy and Max Casella’s gold-chain-wearing A&R rep—but the women characters were underdrawn and the central figure, Bobby Cannavale’s label honcho Richie Finestra, was a walking cliché of a 21st-century television anti-hero.
So despite a few good qualities, Vinyl's death doesn’t really require an autopsy. It does, however, raise questions about the validity and relevance of boomer-era classic-rock tropes in the year 2016. These questions might come as itchy news for Cameron Crowe, whose new show Roadies premieres on Showtime this Sunday, June 26. (The first episode is viewable right now on Showtime’s website to watch without a subscription.)
Roadies goes, uh, “behind the scenes” to look at the lives of the road crew of a rock band called the Staton-House Band (WTF with that name, Cam?) who are popular enough enough to headline arenas, but don’t actually figure into the show at all. We're supposed to accept them as great, but neither their music nor the individual band members play in the story, existing entirely offscreen except for a quick glimpse or two of the lead singer, who's treated by the show's characters as sort of a guru but actually seems kind of like a douche in a limo. Crowe is tilling very familiar turf, turf we've already seen him cover in Almost Famous, probably his last good movie—specifically Crowe's experience as a teenaged rock journalist in the 1970s and his ongoing friendships with Rolling Stone-approved major-label rock bands like Pearl Jam, whose music figures very heavily into Roadies’ soundtrack. His hero worship is benign but empty-headed; you can tell that experience of touring with Led Zeppelin is still the coolest thing that's ever happened to him.
Unfortunately, the show is a disaster, both far too sappy and far too unintelligible to be even vaguely enjoyable. The first episode opens with a gratuitous sex scene, never a good sign, and goes on to include headscratching occurrences like a roadie pulling a gun on the band’s manager, a manbunned new recruit winning over the crew with his ace moves on an espresso maker, and a groupie using the band’s microphone as a sex toy. It’s all depressingly unhilarious, which is unfortunate because of the presence of likable actors like Carla Gugino, Rafe Spall, Imogen Poots, and Luke Wilson, all of whom play characters who fail to register any realistic notes.
Roadies’ premiere on the heels of Vinyl’s cancellation feels particularly ill-timed, as both shows share many of the same problems. We’re firmly in an age when programming like Empire and Beyonce’s long-form video for Lemonade have become television sensations, so revisiting the classic-rock era without any new insight other than “gosh, weren’t things cool back when dinosaur rock bands roamed the earth?" feels like the height of irrelevance. I think both of these shows could have done interesting things within their milieus, similar to the way Mad Men interrogated the seemingly progressive era of the 1960s by focusing on women’s stories and workplace politics, proving, in fact, that social progress and justice moved glacially slowly. But neither Vinyl and, to a greater extent, Roadies have big or even titillating questions on their mind. Instead, they seem content to live in some sort of rockist fantasy camp, where all troubles are solved by a white guy ripping out tasty licks on an electric guitar. I don't think anyone believes in that kind of escapism anymore.