If you love music, then theres something majestic about the passionate and perhaps impossible search that writer and showrunner Terence Winter goes on in the new HBO series Vinyl, trying to find the euphoric electrical cord that runs through great rock 'n' roll from the searing guitar to the pounding drum and the propulsive bass and ends up in your head. The series posits, rightly, that you know it when you hear it, even if over time, you've been fooled by the sound of something that may imitate greatness but not quite get there
The two-hour premiere is directed beautifully by Martin Scorsese, unfolding in terrain well-loved by the director the mean streets of early 1970s New York City. Vinyl, which is executive produced by Mick Jagger, Scorsese, Winter (and a host of others), is a massively ambitious swing by HBO to not only capture a period but a scene that moment in time when a strand of more established rock music was growing creatively fertile again (think: David Bowie, The Rolling Stones) and colliding with the emergence of glam rock, punk rock, disco and hip-hop.
Music being such a personal preference, who knows if the show will be a hit for HBO. But creatively its a thing of real beauty, attempting to tell stories of people absolutely enamored with music on a life-altering level. Cannavale, already established and known to crush a scene on demand, takes his work to an entirely new stratum here Vinyl pulsates in every scene hes in.
