The Misguided Nostalgia of HBO's Vinyl

The first season of the Mick Jagger-Martin Scorsese collaboration didn’t look back wistfully at the 1970s so much as it looked back wistfully at an earlier age of television.
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First off, we will miss you this offseason, Ray Romano—sad sack and lone completely unexpected vector of Vinyl, prone to saying the wrong thing and almost totally oblivious to the worshipful boomer iconography that crowds almost every frame of this show. His Head of Promotions at the portentously named record label American Century probably wasn't meant to be the audience surrogate he became, but he was a good one. The expression on his face, much of the time, spoke for most of us: Really, guys? Also, okay, sure, I will do this cocaine.

Vinyl's first season wasn't good, but it got a bad rap. It had a scene in which a fired employee returned to the American Century offices to bestow a satanic curse on his co-workers while John Denver played winsomely on the radio. It had another scene where Bobby Cannavale's Richie Finestra wandered into the Chelsea Hotel and killed a bat with a tennis racket. It had a spitfire Juno Temple as a young A&R assistant, and a pleasingly dead-eyed Olivia Wilde as a former Warhol muse turned Finestra wife—though, tellingly, Temple's character got semi-fired in the finale, while Wilde's didn't appear at all.

At all! This was a season in which one of the primary fascinations, at least for this viewer, was its penchant for horrendous self-inflicted wounds. Like, say, titling an episode "E.A.B.", after the chord progression, then having Ato Essandoh's muted-bluesman Lester Grimes—a role Essandoh infused with more quiet anger and nuance than Vinyl deserved—literally take us through the history of music, guitar in hand, from "Maybellene" through "The Twist," like a BuzzFeed video about how all songs are the same song dressed up in millions of dollars' worth of licensing fees. Though I sort of treasured the faux-fascinated looks on the faces of the actors who had to act like this was a revelation, rather than the most joylessly pedantic version of rock and roll history this side of the Grammys.

And then there was the biggest self-inflicted wound of all, Cannavale's Finestra, whose zooted connection with the place where the music really comes from, man, was the most repetitive false note on a show not exactly short on false notes. If nothing else, Vinyl was proof that television's Difficult Men—Tony Soprano, Don Draper, et al—have gone from punk rock to Steel Wheels in the fifteen years or so since they first began gracing HBO with their charismatic, self-serving antics.

Vinyl's only unforgivable nostalgia was the one for an era of TV where we'd be impressed by a middle-aged man succumbing to middle-aged demons.

Vinyl suffered from many kinds of familiar nostalgia—for a bygone New York; for that musical moment when disco and Kool Herc and what was about to become punk rock were all mingling, about to explode; for private planes and the record executives who could then afford to fly on them; for old balding mobsters who still frightened sensible people. But Vinyl's only unforgivable nostalgia, it turned out, was the one for an era of television where we'd be impressed by, let alone root for, a middle-aged man succumbing to middle-aged demons while still displaying five to ten minutes of genius per episode.

In last night's finale, after a triumphant concert by Nasty Bits—the proto-punk band that is the flagship of American Century's new sub-label, Alibi—Richie unveils the cover of the band's debut album. He turns out to have co-opted one of his wife's photos (seriously, where was Olivia Wilde?), of a guitar impaling a television—documentation of one of Richie's many cocaine binges, and also a metaphor for what it felt like to watch this show, at times. It's also totally hilarious: the pain in the heart of this old record man is the pain at the heart of punk rock. Sure it is, Vinyl.

And yet I find myself looking forward to this show's second season, which will come without co-creator Terence Winter, who was relieved of command a few weeks ago. It had a way with pointillist, surreal details when it wasn't succumbing to broad platitudes about how music is the ultimate, authentic expression of the soul. Last night saw Cannavale and Romano's characters witness (yet another) murder and a bartender named Hilly Kristal announce that he's thinking of renaming his establishment CBGB. Whatever. But the episode also featured jokes about Hall and Oates, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and a feud about who would get the last bear claw in a box full of pastries. "Every fucking morning, when have I ever touched that bear claw?!" yells an outraged, mutton-chopped P.J. Byrne, bringing much-needed comic relief, a light touch on a show that's too in love with being heavy. Focus on the jokes and the candy and this'll be fine.