Daisy Jones & The Six quickly rose to the charts on Amazon Prime Video following its season one debut on March 3rd. The romance-drama, based on a novel of the same name by Taylor Jenkins Reid (The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, One True Loves), follows the successes and misfortunes of a ‘70s era rock band. Riley Keough (The Terminal List, The Devil All the Time) stars as Daisy Jones and Sam Claflin (Catching Fire, Enola Holmes) portrays Billy Dunne. This article may contain spoilers for the ten-episode miniseries.
Showrunners Scott Neustadter (The Disaster Artist, 500 Days of Summer) and Will Graham (Movie 43, A League of Their Own) recently spoke with The Hollywood Reporter about what it was like to work on the television adaptation.
Neustadter revealed that he was one of ten people to receive the unpublished manuscript of the book. He said of the series: “[It’s] hard to adapt something knowing that everyone is going to be scrutinizing every page and every change. Being the original fan that I was, really the goal here was to replicate the feeling I had reading the book for all of the people who hadn’t read the book or all the people who had read the book when they watched the show. I hope that fans of the book, when they come to the series, recognize that the changes we made, some of them were economical, some of them were creative, but all of them are within the spirit of Taylor’s book.”
Graham offers more insight into how they approached the subject: “Everybody who works on the show is obsessed with the book. That’s why we’re all here. What Taylor Jenkins Reid does in her writing and the passion and huge emotions and the world that she takes you into, we’re just trying to do that same thing for fans in a different medium. But I think what’s particularly interesting about adapting this book and what gave us so many fun opportunities is the novel is in the form of an oral history, so what you’re getting in the novel — and Taylor’s very conscious about this in her writing — is the story people want to tell 30 years later. We know from being humans that memory changes things and the way that people tell their stories changes. There’s also lots of moments in the book where you don’t quite know what happened. Our challenge in the adaptation was to answer some of those questions and unfold them. Ultimately, the book isn’t going anywhere, and as Taylor said, this just gives fans more to enjoy.”
“What we were trying to craft in those final moments is every person — Daisy, Billy and Camila — all [having] really big choices to make,” said Graham of the season finale. “And those choices are getting made out of a better understanding of themselves, but also out of finally really understanding and loving the other people involved.”
Neustadter added, “One of my favorite things about the novel is that it’s messy. These relationships, it would be great if they were really simple and it was easy. I think the sort of push and pull the whole time is, can you navigate those treacherous waters without hurting feelings, without causing a big mess in your family? I just loved exploring that sort of territory.”
The big choices and messiness the creators refer to are of Daisy and Billy’s relationship. Neustadter explained, “Billy’s married and he’s devoted to his wife. Camila loves him and accepts his failings. It’s much more complicated than that and real life is much more complicated than that. The relationship that Billy has with Daisy is a completely different one than the one he has with Camila. I don’t think Camila is jealous of that, but I do think there’s an element of understanding that she can’t give him that thing that Daisy does give him.”
Billy’s relationship with Camila, however, tells a different story: “I felt this about the book as well, but Camila is the hero of the story. She is the heart and the soul of the entire journey. And ultimately the reveal is that this whole thing is basically a daughter [Billy and Camila’s] trying to figure out her parents’ marriage and how her mom could have made the choices that she made. Why would she bring Daisy into the band? It’s really her encouragement that causes Billy to accept all of the turmoil that comes out of that. In our version of the show, she is a part of this band. Their success is her success. She says, ‘I didn’t move here for you. I moved here for us.’ This is her life, too, and she’s not going to let him spoil her life. She does what she has to do the whole time to keep that in mind. The one breaking point for her is if he fell in love with someone else because she’s put him first and all she really wants in return is that he puts her first. If he doesn’t, that’s when there’s no turning back. I was interested in that marriage. I think that there’s something really amazing about her strength. I don’t think anybody’s watching this saying, ‘No, Camila, don’t do it.’ I do think there’s an element of that’s going to be really hard and I hope they find a way out of this.”
The characters struggle with substance abuse in the show. Graham shed some light on how he went about portraying such a serious topic: “Both Billy and Daisy are people with big holes inside of them because of their families and the way they grew up. As many do in the world, you try to find people who fit into some of those spaces and when that doesn’t work, you also try to find substances or other things that fit into some of those spaces. We really wanted to handle those stories with a lot of care and authenticity. But what’s interesting about this show, especially for Billy, is that that’s such a familiar narrative in the world of rock ‘n’ roll. For him, it really is the beginning of his story and the beginning of what makes him complicated as a character. Getting a chance to tell a story, not just of someone’s crash, but of someone who’s really living in recovery and having a full and passionate life and balancing that with the things that they care about and the music they’re making, I thought that was a pretty extraordinary story to be able to tell.”
Another topic in the series is abortion, of which Graham said, “That’s something we talked a lot about with our writer’s room. I think unfortunately in a lot of ways, maybe there’s not as much space between the ’70s women’s experience and the modern experience as we wish that there was. Women’s rights and their bodies have always been under threat in our country and we wanted to tell a story about that, that felt authentic to Karen and authentic to the book and give us a version of her decision that we didn’t feel like we’d seen before.”
The rest of the cast includes Camila Morrone (Valley Girl, Never Goin’ Back), Will Harrison (Venefica, This Is A Film About My Mother), Suki Waterhouse (Seance, Assassination Nation), Josh Whitehouse (The Knight Before Christmas, Poldark), Sebastian Chacon (Emergency, Penny Dreadful: City of Angels), Nabiyah Be (Black Panther, White Wedding), and Tom Wright (Marked For Death, Barbershop), among others. Timothy Olyphant (Amsterdam, A Perfect Getaway) makes an appearance as a guest star.