In a Sea of Adapted Material, Daisy Jones & the Six Is Barely Treading Water

As much as we might beg for something original to grace our TV screens, Hollywood will never let go of the security blanket that comes along with adapting established IP. A screenwriter might come up with a cool new idea about zombies or vampires or being an unhinged woman who experiences so much trauma that we all clap when she burns the world down, but if there’s someone else who has told a similar story through another medium, there’s no doubt that they will be a studio’s first choice. Preexisting IP generally comes with a well-established audience, which guarantees that people will tune in to the pilot of the series, and that’s a lot more cost-effective than taking a chance on a property with no strong cultural roots. 

Daisy Jones & The Six is Prime Video’s latest imagining of a beloved piece of media. Author Taylor Jenkins Reid is a favorite with a large swath of readers on and offline, so it’s no surprise that the series was picked up before the book was released. Really though, the big draw comes from the titular band and their Fleetwood Mac-inspired music and drama. 

While the content of the book is exactly what you would expect from something a step above fanfiction, its presentation as an oral history makes up for the otherwise predictable story. The interviews with the band members and their associated parties paint an impressionist picture of their rise and fall—sometimes everyone remembers what happened the same way and other times there are two or three different versions of the story. Readers get to decide who to trust and who to disregard throughout the story, and that element is ultimately what makes things fun. Unfortunately, that fun was the first thing to go when Daisy Jones & The Six was adapted to the screen.

Not every adaptation can be a powerhouse like The Last of Us or a true global sensation like Game of Thrones. Adaptations have a lot of important contributing factors pouring into them that make them as good as they are, and writers that understand when things need to be cut out of the story or changed are high on that list. TLOU and the early seasons of GoT are great at streamlining, but Daisy Jones & The Six catastrophically fails at it. There are certain things that don’t make complete sense in the book (mainly regarding record label and touring logistics), and as much as fans of the books love the lyrics to the songs on the Aurora album we get in the final pages, they’re more like poems than anything else. The Amazon-produced version of Aurora we received can’t touch any of Fleetwood Mac’s greatest hits, but it’s pretty good as companion soundtracks for TV go—and ultimately a change for the betterment of the series. 

But other changes buckle the foundation of the story. In the show, Chuck quits the band to go to dentistry school, but in the book, he gets drafted and then dies in the Vietnam War. Despite being set in the ‘60s and ‘70s, there is no mention of it past Billy saying, “It was two options for the kids in my town… the Mill or the War,” which clearly wasn’t true if Chuck was able to go off and learn how to drill holes in people’s teeth. His blink-and-you’ll-miss-it departure paired with the show cutting The Six’s, well, sixth member Pete (Eddie’s older brother) leaves the band at five people—with Camila as an honorary member because she’s sitting at the table with everyone else while they decide on a name. Pete only spoke once in the books, but he wasn’t absent from the story in the slightest. At the very least, he was someone for Eddie to bounce off of instead of him complaining to dead air, and without him around, Eddie being a bit unlikable goes from interesting to annoying. More importantly, he served as a sign that the band never stood a chance in the first place because he never planned to be a part of it forever. Billy and Daisy’s relationship might have been the hyper-visible implosion at the front of the band’s collapse, but the book makes it clear that things were doomed regardless.

The most disappointing changes to the story come in the forms of Daisy, Camila, and Karen. While Camila and Karen get a bit more face time than they do in the book, it is in exchange for some of their agency. When The Six leave for LA in the novel, Camila and Billy break up, mainly because Billy doesn’t fight to save their relationship, and they only get back together when he realizes that he doesn’t want to be living his dream without her. She explicitly tells him that she doesn’t want to follow him around the entire time she’s in LA when she dumps him, but she spends most of her time in the show doing exactly that. Her friendship with Karen is also minimized in the show, as is Karen’s relationship with Daisy. Camila and Karen at least have a few conversations to themselves, but Karen’s already small friendship with Daisy is basically non-existent in favor of playing up Karen’s romance with Graham. They’re elevated from the under-the-radar situationship the pair have in the book to a more equal, mutual romance in the show, yet it’s for the worse. Sure, it’s great drama for someone who hasn’t read the book and doesn’t plan to, but for those who have, it’s a complete mischaracterization of Karen.

The only character that stands to benefit from the changes the adaptation makes is Simone. She is the one character that has truly been expanded upon in Daisy Jones & The Six, and it didn’t come at the expense of anyone else (not that I would have complained if it had). The book iteration of Simone has her own career playing out alongside everything else, but she never gets her time to shine. Despite all of her achievements and her label as a “Disco Pioneer,” the book falls back to her being Daisy’s supportive Black best friend, even when she doesn’t deserve Simone’s help and patience. The show takes her character and runs with her, giving her the agency she deserved in the book while giving the audience a look into a significant part of black queer culture. Simone is the best part of Daisy Jones & The Six, and it’s unfortunate that the whole show isn’t about her.

Alas, one character getting the better treatment she deserves doesn’t erase everything else. It would have been a trickier format, but Daisy Jones & The Six should have taken advantage of its slew of unreliable narrators. The book is all about differing memories of what happened to the band, and what better way to do that than by showing different versions of what happened? The book is a little experimental with its oral history formatting, and the show deserved to play with that quirk too. Instead, we got a very typical drama with a great cast and a huge budget. Sure people will watch, but we’re not getting the adaptation we deserve.

Kathryn Porter is a freelance writer who will talk endlessly about anything entertainment given the chance. You can find her @kaechops on Twitter.

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