I wanted to like Vinyl. It's my time period. I was 20 in 1973 and very involved with local music and musicians. But Vinyl is not really about the music of 1973. It is about out of touch record executives scheming to find the next person they can screw, both literally and figuratively. So much of it seems like a parody of 1973 rather than reality. The scenes with the German Polygram executives seemed straight out of Fawlty Towers ("Don't mention the war"). The treatment of the Lester Grimes character is pretty much criminal for a man who is supposed to be able to spot talent. Too much name dropping - e.g. constant references in the first episode to Led Zeppelin, and a painfully awkward scene backstage with a preening Robert Plant. The cocaine use seems like simply part of the required checklist - after all it is New York in the 70s. Have to include massive amounts of coke, right? The acting is uniformly good. The sets are great and costuming nearly perfect. Hairstyles are embarrassingly accurate. (Check out one guy's mutton-chop sideburns.) But for all the surface perfection, Vinyl feels hollow and inauthentic. Nothing but the anarchic punk club scene seemed anything like reality to me. And that seemed to come right out of Sid and Nancy. Beautifully done but ultimately empty and disappointing.
