Please, please, stop giving old white men television shows. The latest travesty to hit the airwaves is Roadies, a show about a rock tour crew imagined up by Cameron Crowe, the writer and director of Almost Famous.
Along with Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom and Martin Scorsese’s Vinyl, Roadies is emblematic of a plague of what happens when TV executives let old men with an axe to grind do whatever they want. The result is always the same: the exultation of the past at the expense of the future – an attempt to rewrite the world to fit somebody’s outdated ideology.
Roadies revolves around a group of music diehards who would give their lives for the Stanton House Band, a Mumford and Sons-esque trio that somehow fills arenas. We find the gang in crisis, with a histrionic consultant named Reg (Rafe Spall) joins the tour to make the band make money. Reg quickly fires the roadies’ beloved leader, who’s the kind of dinosaur who wears a Lynyrd Skynyrd memento around his neck and says things like, “when you’re looking at me you’re looking at the history of American rock n’ roll.”
His replacement is the frontman’s childhood best friend, Bill (Luke Wilson), who proves his classic rock credibility by saying: “When all the other kids were reading Sounder, I was reading Hammer of the Gods.” Bill’s will-they-won’t-they foil is Sheila (Carla Gugino, criminally wasted), a pragmatic roadie who’s mostly in it for the money.
The center of the story, though, is Kelly-Ann (Imogen Poots), who plans to leave the tour for film school because she doesn’t love “her” band like she used to. “I have to be a fan of something or I’m nothing,” she complains at one point. “I’m useless. I’m worker bee No1 on the bus.” Kelly-Ann struggles with the concept of a job, but ultimately gives up giving it up with a fiery speech – “you either love what you do or you get the fuck out” – that also inspires the band to change their setlist for once.
Inevitably, she doesn’t just return to the tour but runs back into the arena – carrying a skateboard, which you’d think she would use. Kelly-Ann is Crowe’s idea of a virtuous hero, a woman who gives up her dreams of making art so she can bask in the second-hand glory of a rock band by rigging their lights. There’s something to be said about the nobility of the men and women who support art from the wings of the stage, but if this girl is driven by her own vision, why should she be praised for sublimating that to a bunch of guys who don’t know her name?
Roadies most resembles The Newsroom in the pantheon of old-white-man-idea TV. Just as Sorkin decided to remake the news and fight for the integrity of 24-hour cable – an institution three Snapchats from extinction – Crowe responds to a desolate music industry by reinventing touring. In his world, corporate suits would force artists to sacrifice tradition and their romantic ideas of music, while plucky peons fight back. In the real world, it’s slightly more complex.
Roadies also shares some delusions with Vinyl, Scorsese’s drama about a 1970s record label that HBO renewed and then canceled. That show was made with Mick Jagger’s help, and seemed to embody the idea that no one’s made good music since he stopped making it – so maybe 1982. “Jimi Hendrix and Kurt Cobain didn’t die to become a crop top at Urban Outfitters,” someone yells on Roadies – an exclamation on the same idea. It takes less than a minute for Roadies to expose someone’s breasts, and only five minutes before someone declares that Bob Dylan was the greatest who ever lived.
Vinyl and Roadies are shows that pretend, stupidly, that the world lacks Beyoncé.
This notion of greatness and sentimentality that these showrunners cling to is not only bogus but anathema to young people. Kelly-Ann doesn’t need to listen to Bob Dylan, she needs to watch great film, made 50 years ago or last week, so that she can make her own art.
Those who make fun of One Direction, Wiz Khalifa or Taylor Swift today would have been those to dismiss Dylan, Jagger and Bowie 50 years ago, then Jackson, the Ramones and Prince. You can enjoy all those artists, or just a few. Roadies also might make you want to stand outside Crowe’s apartment with a boombox blaring Kanye West. (Crowe directed that famous scene in Say Anything, so it’s probably happened before.)
Roadies is not the worst show in the world. The cast is great, the production sound, and the soundtrack has some really great – if nostalgic – music. My opposition is philosophical: against the middle-class, male-centric idea of what artistic success is in America, and the quixotic idea that art always triumphs over capitalism – reality seems a lot messier than that, last I checked. There are many, many more worlds worth exploring than just the ones with a tinge of faded glory, like classic rock or TV news.
So far, famous film-makers who turn to TV have fallen into this paradigm – it seems doubtful that whatever Woody Allen creates with Amazon will turn out differently. The boardrooms bigwigs of big media companies seem so excited that film legends might visit that they seem willing to let them get away with anything. But we don’t need them: there are enough great people making television that, with any luck, some of that $100m shoveled at Scorsese might go to 10 young people to make shows that reflect an American public that has more diverse interests than the men who preceded them.
This is one of the great chances of “peak TV”: it could mean diverse voices have a say. But sadly, it also seems that some of these people are being squeezed out in favor of directors who haven’t made a good film in 16 years – looking at you, Crowe. Why remake the world into the vision of how the world was – or really how people falsely remember it – and why not let someone else have a shot at showing what it’s like?
• Roadies debuts on Showtime on Sunday, 26 June at 10pm ET.
