--- title: 'Vinyl' on HBO Was a Major Disappointment: What Went Wrong? description: The show uses familiar language to tell a story about unimpeachable rock gods. It’s all risk-free 'quality' and no delight. canonical: https://time.com/4297119/hbo-vinyl-season-1-music-martin-scorsese-mick-jagger-rock-music/ author: Daniel D'Addario article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-04-18T03:01:59.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-22T16:48:54.747Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: 'Vinyl' on HBO Was a Major Disappointment: What Went Wrong? og:description: The drama disappointed despite its lofty pedigree. Can it be saved? og:url: https://time.com/4297119/hbo-vinyl-season-1-music-martin-scorsese-mick-jagger-rock-music/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5a51d92b21d4a772/69888f69cd1bba9ad2700496/gettyimages-483695596.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: GettyImages-483695596 og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: 'Vinyl' on HBO Was a Major Disappointment: What Went Wrong? twitter:description: The drama disappointed despite its lofty pedigree. Can it be saved? twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt5a51d92b21d4a772/69888f69cd1bba9ad2700496/gettyimages-483695596.jpg?branch=production&width=3840&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # HBO's _Vinyl_ Was a Major Disappointment: What Went Wrong? > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with Ally. 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Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account.  by [Daniel D'Addario](https://time.com/author/daniel-daddario/)  ## Daniel D'Addario Apr 18, 2016 3:01 AM UTC  (L-R) Birgitte Hjort Sorensen, Olivia Wilde and Bobby Cannavale film HBO's"Vinyl" on August 11, 2015 in New York City. (L-R) Birgitte Hjort Sorensen, Olivia Wilde and Bobby Cannavale film HBO's"Vinyl" on August 11, 2015 in New York City.Steve Sands—2015 Steve Sands  by [Daniel D'Addario](https://time.com/author/daniel-daddario/)  ## Daniel D'Addario Apr 18, 2016 3:01 AM UTC On Sunday night, HBO will launch the sixth season of _Game of Thrones_, its most-watched show ever. _Thrones_ boasts a devoted army of fans who’ve spent the past year speculating about the fate of Jon Snow, and enough critical credibility to take the Best Drama Emmy last year — HBO’s first winning show in that category since _The Sopranos_. The latest _GoT_ premiere can’t come soon enough for a network with a great deal of strengths that lately don’t include its drama slate. The diminishing returns provided by _Vinyl_, a period show about the New York recording industry, have been this year’s biggest TV plot twist, and show just how far HBO has to go to reclaim the TV-drama crown from an increasingly robust set of competitors. After a flawed-but-promising launch, how did _Vinyl_ go so wrong, and could it ever rock? To be clear, I was [no particular fan](http://time.com/4217048/vinyl-mick-jagger-martin-scorcese/) of the two-hour pilot, directed by Martin Scorsese; it felt overstuffed both with cliché and incident (a murder plotline and a backstory about a grave injustice along racial lines that felt out-of-place on a drama notionally about a record company). Bobby Cannavale was working perhaps too hard to sell a character drawn from a word-cloud about male TV protagonists of the past decade. His Richie Finestra — an inattentive husband who abuses substances as a way to briefly escape the painful level of passion he brings to his job — was, from the start, more an idea of manhood than a man. If a show’s going to be ambitious about the volume of drama it expects us to follow, it can’t skimp on the characters who are supposed to make us actually care. But shows often learn how to be about what they’re about as they progress. And _Vinyl_’s pedigree — stars Cannavale, Ray Romano, and Olivia Wilde; producers Scorsese, Mick Jagger, and _Boardwalk Empire_’s Terence Winter — seemed to imply that it would find its footing. Instead, _Vinyl_ leaned yet more heavily as it wore on what didn’t work. The show relied too strongly, for instance, on empty-calorie cameos from actors dutifully but not transcendentally playing rock gods, either interacting with fictional characters or performing their hits. Every _Vinyl_ viewer will have their own least favorite; mine has to be John Lennon and Yoko Ono bumping into Wilde’s Edie Sedgwick-inspired character Devon at Max’s Kansas City. There’s got to be a more fitting homage to one of music’s greatest than chucking a look-alike on the screen and presuming familiarity will be enough to impress. But worse still was the show’s reliance on tropes around addiction that, if they ever really worked on TV, have grown tired. Don Draper, TV’s great recent addict, was charming enough for the viewer to entertain the notion that he had some core of humanity; Richie Finestra is just a loud jerk. Devon leaving him to move to the Chelsea Hotel felt both like a third-season-finale development uncorked early out of a dearth of ideas and like the only choice that made sense. “I got clean,” Richie tells her deep into the season, begging forgiveness. “For how long—a day?” she replies. His addiction is so endlessly recursive, pushing him again and again into the depths without modulation or novelty and pushing other great actors to the side, that her frustration is ours. By the time, in the season finale, that Richie declares that he’s running an anarchic company now and encourages his employees to spray-paint the walls, his coping mechanisms feel old-hat. How long are we meant to run from reality with him? HBO is apparently aware _Vinyl_ isn’t working; they [brought an end](http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/09/arts/television/terence-winter-out-as-vinyl-showrunner.html) to Winter’s work running the show as it goes into its second season, calling it “an appropriate time to make a change in the creative direction of the show.” Creative turnarounds are within the realm of possibility at HBO; just last year, _The Leftovers_ rebounded from a too-challenging, needlessly baroque first season with a second set of episodes that were among the year’s very best. But _The Leftovers_ was building on a universe that had real yet unfulfilled promise. There’s little in _Vinyl_’s world of uninteresting clichés that feels like it’s a tweak away from greatness. Worse still for the premium-cable service, _The Leftovers_ failed to draw in new fans; its next season will be its last. While HBO, which does not sell ads on its air, is understandably more concerned with subscriber numbers than with Nielsen figures. _Vinyl_’s low viewership, never breaking a million viewers an episode, can hardly be something to cheer. HBO is, to be clear, a very successful enterprise, with the reigning Emmy champions in drama (_Thrones_) and comedy (_Veep_), a movie catalog, _Sesame Street_, and talent from Jon Stewart to Bill Simmons to [Beyoncé](http://www.cnn.com/2016/04/16/entertainment/beyonce-lemonade-hbo/) on their team. But their inability to develop a consistent drama hit since the _Thrones_ launch in 2011 feels perhaps tied to that safety. Cable TV’s best new dramas since 2011 — Showtime’s _Homeland_, FX’s _Fargo_ and _The People v. O.J. Simpson_, and, though it’s early yet, USA’s _Mr. Robot_ would be on that list — feel like the results of networks trying to take meaningful risks with their brands. _Vinyl_ is a show using familiar language to tell a story about unimpeachable rock gods. It’s all “quality” and no delight. It’s a blue-chip stock, and exactly the kind of risk-free endeavor that the best of TV is quickly moving past. 'Vinyl' on HBO Was a Major Disappointment: What Went Wrong? ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/4297119/hbo-vinyl-season-1-music-martin-scorsese-mick-jagger-rock-music/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/4297119/hbo-vinyl-season-1-music-martin-scorsese-mick-jagger-rock-music/"},"headline":"HBO's Vinyl Was a Major Disappointment: What Went Wrong?","datePublished":"2016-04-18T03:01:59.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-22T16:48:54.747Z","description":"The drama disappointed despite its lofty pedigree. 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