Spoiler alert: this recap assumes you’ve seen episode nine of Vinyl on HBO or Sky Atlantic. Don’t read on if you haven’t.
‘You stood in front of me coked out of your mind and told me you spent the week with a dead man!’
Rather worryingly for a season approaching its finale, by far the most major drama in Vinyl this week played out behind the scenes. HBO just announced the removal of showrunner Terence Winter for the second series in a “change of creative direction.” He is replaced by Scott Z Burns (Bourne Ultimatum) as showrunner and Max Borenstein (Godzilla) as executive producer. Neither have run a TV show before, so this is bigger news than it might appear.
Winter has been one of HBO’s biggest hitters for two decades, giving the world none-too-shabby shows like The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire. So the underperformance of this programme that’s presumably too big to fail clearly called for drastic action. For fans, it could actually be great news. Winter’s hit-list in gangsterism speaks for itself. But the near-universal consensus on Vinyl is that the gangsterism has been an unnecessary distraction, and that somewhere there’s a compelling psychodrama about the backroom deals, backstabbing, ego and excess of rock’n’roll’s golden age fighting to get out.
This penultimate hour proved another case in point. Events come home to roost, and the show is pulled in as many different directions as Richie Finestra. The murder rap turns out to be a red herring. The police are using what they know about Buck’s death to make Richie rat on Galasso – which is a death sentence anyway. So without much resolution, Richie’s back to work, and a sequence of unrelated events bring about some kind of event horizon. The Nasty Bits are really coming together now, but with gangster money having raised the stakes, Richie loses his nerve, and baffles his colleagues by going with Maury’s suggestion of a 50s compilation to make a quick buck. Zak realises the truth about what happened in Vegas and takes a half-hearted, broken man’s revenge. And because of that, possibly, Richie resolves to tell Devon the truth about Buck Rogers. I think there’s supposed to be some chain of causality there – perhaps Richie’s frayed mental state means it’s supposed to be confusing. Certainly by the end, it seems to be the power of the Nasty Bits’ track that makes him decide to take the cops’ deal. Or something? The redemptive power of rock’n’roll has always led the guy towards iffy decisions.
‘No one wants to make girls A&R reps’
On the theme of things coming home to roost, this week the show once again deigned to give some story oxygen to the women. Jamie’s life was fleshed out to a point, as her slumming it with the rock’n’roll degenerates leaves her cut adrift by her family, her monstrous mother apparently paying her aunt to turf her out on to the streets. Juno Temple gets to play vulnerability, but Jamie’s nothing if not a survivor. Her unorthodox means of self-preservation comes by embedding herself further with the Nasty Bits and instigating a threesome with Kip and newly-shorn guitarist Alex. You can see why she would go there – Alex is infinitely fitter after his haircut, and we should say that Jamie comes over as nothing but empowered in that sequence. If trouble lies ahead, as it surely does, it looks to come from Kip, who in that post-coital scene looks hugely uncomfortable and suddenly out of his depth.
But you can feel Andrea’s frustration at the women’s readiness to sleep with the talent; her lack of sympathy for Cece – now pregnant by Hannibal – is double-edged. She’s frustrated with these women for, as she sees it, offering themselves up, but she still resents having to be a sister – she’s here to work, and is one of the few people at American Century who seem to know what they’re doing. We’ll see how that office politicking plays out with Scott the lawyer’s inevitable gay affair with Xavier.
Devon meanwhile, is still no happier to be living out her divorce fantasy, still holed up in the Chelsea Hotel airily taking photographs of her new boyfriend in the nude while Ingrid looks after the kids. If she’s starting to wish she’d been careful what she wished for, Richie’s new predicament looks set to make her reevaluate stuff all over again. All of which sheds light on to something else I’ve suspected for a while – that Ingrid is about the only person in the entire show who has her shit together.
Fact and fiction
With all the strands approaching resolution, there was no room for an awkward rock star impersonation this time. The closest it came was another bizarre-dream-sequence-interlude, presumably Richie’s inner monologue, of a Fake Eddie Cochrane doing C’mon Everybody. Not that it was the episode’s most bizarre sequence – an honour reserved for the scene with the bat and the tennis racket. What was supposed to be going on there exactly?!
Sound and vision
One of Vinyl’s consistent strengths has been the original songs commissioned for the soundtrack. This week saw one of the best yet, as Clark’s A&R streak found him creating disco at Jorge’s uptown funk club. Overplayed as that scene might have been, it did feel like something akin to a religious conversion for the characters. And for that we have to thank DJ Cassidy and Nile Rodgers with Kill The Lights. Glee fans will recognise the singer Alex Newell, aka McKinley’s transgender student Wade ‘Unique’ Adams.
Sleeve notes
Talking of Scott and Xavier, after all the set-up last week, that strand goes absolutely nowhere here.
American Century are sticking with Donny Osmond but dropping Indigo. And they’re going after The Magic Tramps. They won’t get far: the glam punk leader Eric Emerson would be dead by 1975.
“I became a professional entertainer of musicians, either nurturing or kicking smack habits. Somehow our pool became the best place in the country to do either.” Devon explains her undeveloped rolls of Jimi Hendrix snaps – and suddenly her old life doesn’t sound so bad after all.
More gold from Detective Renk: “Anybody ever call you Harlem Marlon?”
So … with just a week to go, have you been sticking with Vinyl? Are you encouraged by the promised “change in creative direction”? Where do you think they’re going with all of this? And what, dear god, was the deal with the bat?
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