What’s the name of the show? Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll
Seriously? With no spaces? Yes.
Is that incredibly annoying to type? Absolutely, and I am going to try to avoid ever doing it again.
When does it premiere? Thursday 16 July at 10pm EST on FX.
What is this show? Denis Leary plays Johnny Rock, a 90s rocker who ruined every promising band he was ever in and never stopped abusing booze and drugs. Now he’s washed up and destitute in his middle age and flirts with the daughter he never knew he had at a concert. Turns out she’s loaded and wants to be a singer and she pays him to get his old band, the Heathens, back together and write some new songs for her.
What’s the show’s pedigree? Leary writes the episodes and the songs that the band plays.
Wait, Denis Leary writes rock music? I didn’t know this either until watching the show.
What does his stuff sound like? It’s a kind of easily forgettable blues-inflected rock that you would imagine a middle-aged actor would write. In a fake Where Are They Now? documentary that kicks off the first episode, Rock and his band are supposed to sound like “The Who fucked the Clash”. Instead they sound more like a slower version of the Pogues. That’s probably not a coincidence. There are three Pogues jokes in the first four episodes.
What if I don’t know who the Pogues are? Then this is not the series for you.
Is this show any good? The whole concept of Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll is that Johnny is an “artist” who believes that a true rock star should sleep around, do tons of drugs, drink all the booze he can lay his hands on, and screw every broad that crosses his path – even if it’s a friend’s fiancé. Johnny lives and dies for his art. He is penniless but he’s pure. He has never joined a covers band, never sold out his band’s one true hit to a car commercial, and hates the fact that the Kardashians are more famous than him. (There’s a cringey “I would suck Bruce Jenner’s dick, if he still had one” joke in the pilot, which seems jarringly off-key in the current climate.)
That’s when I realized that Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll (ugh, I hate you, title!) is really Denis Leary’s musical equivalent of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom on HBO. On The Newsroom, Sorkin created a fake news station so that he could rewrite history and deliver the news in the righteous way he thought it should be presented. What he created was a utopia that no one wanted except cranky old men like himself.
The same happens with Denis Leary and the Heathens. This band would never have been huge, not even in the early 90s. Back then, the world was focused on grunge, not the kind of rudimentary pub rock the Heathens churn out. No one cares about Johnny’s rock’n’roll sanctimony either, which the show harps on mercilessly. And the songs that Johnny and his newly reconciled former bandmate Flash (John Corbett) write wouldn’t get any attention in the current day and age of Katy Perry, hip-hop and indie bands from Brooklyn hiding behind greasy bangs.
While I like the idea of an aged and failing rocker having to connect with his 25-year-old daughter, I don’t believe in this relationship at all. No matter how bad Gigi’s (Elizabeth Gilles) daddy issues are, she would never be so reverent of her father’s music that she’d want to recreate it. Frances Bean, another rock progeny who grew up without her father, doesn’t even like Nirvana. There is no way that Gigi would make this old-man classic rock, and there is no way that the music on the show would get her the traction depicted here.
Is the biggest problem the music? Well, the music sort of makes the whole universe feel unbelievable – unlike on Empire, where Timbaland’s songs are very often genuine jams (and bestsellers on iTunes), and it’s easy to believe that these R&B singers would become huge acts. The same is not true on this show (whose name I refuse to type one more time).
What about the rest of the show? It’s not so great. It’s kind of boring, actually. There’s a huge scene where Leary tells his band mates that they can’t hit on his daughter and that she “doesn’t have a pussy”. It is the oldest joke in the book, one about as tired as Johnny Rock’s Rod Stewart mullet (and indeed, Stewart has cracked similar gags). There could be some interesting depth to Johnny and his rectification with his failures, but this show is not interested in exploring that. Instead, it’s concerned with trying to find a way to rewrite history and make him a star – the most boring avenue of all.
Which characters will you love? Gigi is brash, ballsy and quite a different character than we see on most comedies. She can also sing the hell out of a song, even Leary’s half-baked numbers. Ava (Elaine Hendrix) plays Johnny’s backup singer and long-time girlfriend, who never gave up on him being famous but now loves being a surrogate mother to Gigi. I think she’s the most interesting person in the whole band.
What’s the best thing about it? For music fans of a certain age, there are a lot of fun cameos, including regular jokes about Greg Dulli from the Afghan Whigs. Also Joan Jett, Dave Grohl, Matt Pinfield and others stop by for small roles. It’s kind of cute but also makes the show feel pleased with its own lack of relevance to the current moment.
Should you watch this show? If you know who Shane MacGowan is you might get a kick out of this, but for everyone else it’s unimpressive and smug. If I wanted that, I would go to a Lady Gaga concert.
