Daisy Jones, and the Delights of a Messy, Complicated Woman

I love the messy, complicated parts of me, and I want my fictional protagonists to be even bigger and messier.

I must admit to being a little worried that the Daisy Jones of the series would not be Daisy Jones. 

As a writer working on a similarly-themed rock and roll novel set in Hollywood in 1977, I’ve been greatly looking forward to the television series, currently airing on Amazon Prime. Daisy Jones & the Six has been one of my comps–books that writers use to describe their own work by comparison–and while my own writing, and story, is vastly different from Taylor Jenkins Reid’s, I adore a messy, complicated main character.

After reading a few reviews, I was worried that the series wasn’t going to let Daisy fully be her messy, fucked-up, glorious self, but after watching the first three episodes, I am fully in. Riley Keogh’s Daisy is grounded in a way that I don’t remember the book version being.

This Daisy–apart from the massive success that will soon be coming her way–is someway I can relate to. She’s me, or at least an aspirational version of me. That teen girl going to the Whisky and falling in love with music was me. That bed-hopping, hard-drinking chick who spends all of her non-partying hours immersed in songwriting was me too. Shit, even her little red book that she carries with her everywhere looks exactly like the little red book that I carried everywhere in the late 70s/early 80s. 

Daisy doesn’t play by your rules. She’s not interested in being put in a box, not interested in being shaped, she is who she is, take it or leave it. I loved seeing her shove pornstache dude–who had a massive hit with a song he stole from her–into the pool at a party at Sowden House. The glory of a chaotic protagonist is that they don’t have to be held back by fear, they can be the person who does what you always wished you could do. 

I love the messy, complicated parts of me, and I want my fictional protagonists to be even bigger and messier. Fuck it all up, do the wrong thing, be a bad ass. My sharp edges have been worn thin with time, the result of so-called friends who thought I should be quieter, take smaller bites of the world, be less than. Fuck that. I want loud, hungry characters.

As for the series, the problems with Daisy Jones & the Six are obvious. Without the multiple—and thus unreliable—narration of the book, everything is presented as fact.  There’s no mystery here. And quite frankly Billy is completely unlikeable, although he was pretty unlikable in the book too.  But three episodes in and I see no balance to his doucheness. This Billy doesn’t have the charisma to lead The Six to stardom.  

But the biggest problem with Daisy Jones & the Six? The music. In the book you can imagine what the greatest rock and roll record of 1977 sounds like, but the music in the series is middle-of-the-road mediocrity. It’s terminally ok. While I love that Amazon released the fictional album as a companion piece, it’s lacking anything resembling a hook. How was this the biggest band, the biggest concert, an era-defining moment the way Frampton Comes Alive or Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was without any memorable tunes? 

Leave your thoughts about Daisy Jones in the comments.

Daisy Jones and the Six is currently airing on Amazon Prime.