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Scott Z. Burns (The Informant!, Contagion) replaces Terence Winter as showrunner on Vinyl

I've been putting off watching the last couple episodes because the show's really been getting on my nerves-- it just feels like a weak mash-up of far better series, and there's nary a single performance or character that holds my interest so far. Burns has been responsible for a couple of top-tier Soderbergh films, so maybe he can put the show back on track.

Pretty dramatic move, though, given Winter's relationship with Scorsese over the past few years.

I'm actually not a huge fan of Terence Winter - except for Vinyl, I didn't think his work was terrible, but it was far from great. I pretty much hated the first few episodes of Vinyl, so much that I've lost any desire to see any more of the series. The handling of the music has been disastrous. I don't know if Burns will be any better, but I can't see this show suffering a huge loss with Winter's departure.

I think Winter is a great talent -- he was the best writer on The Sopranos besides David Chase himself (high praise indeed), and he has a real distinctive sense of humor and overall style that lent itself perfectly to The Wolf of Wall Street as well as the better bits of Vinyl. (I still have yet to watch Boardwalk Empire). I've seen every Vinyl episode thus far and it's the definition of a mixed bag, though I can't tell if it seems to be getting increasingly tiresome because of anything objective or just because I'm pretty sick of it all. Without Winter on board, I can't imagine the show being even worth a glance. Even Scorsese's pilot episode was pretty empty at the end of the day, a re-hashing in tone and theme of Wolf and countless other works by Scorsese and others.

So far the show has yet to do anything that breaks out of all the most cliche'd tropes of both male antihero TV and various media that extols the virtues of rock music in the 70s; it's right up there with True Detective's disastrous second season (and parts of its mostly excellent first) in seeming like something that came mechanically rolling out of a vending machine titled "Gritty Prestige Drama No. 44928." I can definitely see HBO back out of their early Season 2 renewal of the show now, a la The Brink. Certainly wouldn't blame them. Vinyl has absolutely no focus -- every episode almost seems like a different show in the way it veers awkwardly to another subject entirely -- but not in an interestingly subversive, Sopranos-esque way, either. I suspect that such glaring flaws are a big reason why Winter would be dissatisfied enough to leave, though it's also possible he had a big hand in making the mess we're looking at and just decided to back out before things got too embarrassing.

oh yeah wrote:Vinyl has absolutely no focus -- every episode almost seems like a different show in the way it veers awkwardly to another subject entirely -- but not in an interestingly subversive, Sopranos-esque way, either. I suspect that such glaring flaws are a big reason why Winter would be dissatisfied enough to leave, though it's also possible he had a big hand in making the mess we're looking at and just decided to back out before things got too embarrassing.

Boardwalk Empire was exactly the same way after its second season. There were little to no grand plans for any of the characters, just a dozen plotlines slowly inching towards a big finale only to be killed off or reset the next season (I would still recommend checking it out though, its more furstrating than bad and mostly works itself out by the end). Given that Winter chose to give up on Boardwalk for Vinyl I doubt he left the new show willingly. He may be a good writer with someone else's ideas but he clearly isn't a good showrunner

The whole Rock Star Of The Week thing got old a while ago and I really hate that the Wennerverse article of faith that the only true Rock is simple and loud is woven throughout this whole canvas. That trip to see the Tullish band which ended with the guy's sleeve getting caught on fire was a particularly noxious example of that.

I was quite interested in the basic premise and I love both Cannivale and Wilde but this has been a solid disappointment for me, increasingly so as it's gone along.

Just for the record, I loved Boardwalk Empire, from beginning to end.

This is the fourth time HBO has walked back on a show's second-season renewal in the last ten years, after Luck, The Brink, and Tell Me You Love Me.

The Narrator Returns wrote:This is the fourth time HBO has walked back on a show's second-season renewal in the last ten years, after Luck, The Brink, and Tell Me You Love Me.

Wow. Vinyl's something of a cake-taker, though, given that it had a two-season commitment from the jump and floundered creatively more or less across the board.

Of course, Luck was because of the fact that animals kept dying/getting hurt during production, right?

Seems to me like it's some dusting off by the new head of programming. This felt like something that probably would never have gotten picked up at all without Scorsese's name behind it, who's better off doing movies than long-form series.

Drucker wrote:Of course, Luck was because of the fact that animals kept dying/getting hurt during production, right?

I think 7 horses died during production. It's a shame that Michael Mann's one stab at doing something like this ended this way, his form of story-telling is perfect for the format.

It's widely believed that HBO used the horses thing as an excuse to walk away from a renewal they regretted. Clearly they have more confidence to do so now

Too bad. Even though it was uneven and at times over the top, I was looking forward to the direction they were going to take it.

flyonthewall2983 wrote:

Drucker wrote:Of course, Luck was because of the fact that animals kept dying/getting hurt during production, right?

I think 7 horses died during production. It's a shame that Michael Mann's one stab at doing something like this ended this way, his form of story-telling is perfect for the format.

I'm pretty sure it was less than 7, but in any case the way those horses died was not some anomaly due to the show not looking after them -- it was all but inevitable and happens every day with or without cameras. Obviously HBO had to cancel it because of the bad publicity and PETA would've never let them forget it, but I think HBO really did respect the show. They didn't care it didn't pull in big ratings, that's never been HBO's purpose, they liked it because it was a huge prestige project with huge names made by two of the finest artists of their generation. And I believe that Luck was a beautiful series, perhaps a little ponderous in the start but quickly becoming one of the most unique and exciting shows that I've ever seen, with the Hoffman/Farina material some of the most fascinating spin on gangster stuff put to television. A shame it had to end but at least it went out with its greatest episode, the gorgeous Mimi Leder-directed Ep 9.

Anyway... Vinyl was a mess. This is not surprising at all, I was waiting for them to pull a Brink and eat their words. God knows the show had potential, sometimes realized, but all in all the first season just whisked by like so much padded, cliche'd nothingness; competent and occasionally quite good, but a definite failure to create some kind of new HBO Prestige Drama Classic. Sort of like True Detective Season 2.

oh yeah wrote:Anyway... Vinyl was a mess. This is not surprising at all, I was waiting for them to pull a Brink and eat their words. God knows the show had potential, sometimes realized, but all in all the first season just whisked by like so much padded, cliche'd nothingness; competent and occasionally quite good, but a definite failure to create some kind of new HBO Prestige Drama Classic. Sort of like True Detective Season 2.

I have to admit I haven't seen anymore than just the trailer, but from the way it was presented in that form it felt like it would be exactly that. That I learned about nearly every rock band in the 70's made it less appealing, because the suspension of belief would be done away with if someone imitating Robert Plant or Alice Cooper is wheeled out into this otherwise fictional world.

I hope this new head of production is getting some knee pads, ready to beg and plead for David Fincher's forgiveness.

I'm disappointed by the decision even if I agree the first season of Vinyl was uneven with the missteps outnumbering the successful elements (the "Elvis in Vegas" episode with Gene Jones as a frighteningly passive-aggressive Colonel Parker was a trippy gem). Now we won't get to see "Jeff Starship" become Joey Ramone!

You can add the Duplass Brothers' delightful Togetherness as another HBO series unexpectedly cancelled as they were preparing a new (third) season. The show couldn't have cost much to produce, so it seems HBO just didn't want it taking up space.

It took some effort to watch this show and it really felt incredibly tiresome towards the end. The only bright spots for me were Romano (mostly because this felt more like his performance on Men of a Certain Age) and Annie Parisse. On some podcast I was listening to (maybe it was Simmons), Chuck Klosterman summed his thoughts up on the show by asking if there was anyone else on the planet who was as nostalgic about snorting coke as Martin Scorsese. While I'm not sure that nostalgia is entirely provided by Scorsese on this project, that was a fairly accurate description of the show's overall tone. It was the HBO-prestige-drama equivalent of that one insufferable baby boomer at a party who keeps expounding on how wonderful it was back when you would fear for your life when walking through Times Square, because "that's when art was REAL, man". This show also made me realize how exhausting Bobby Cannavale can be when he's not provided in small doses. I'm waiting for the ill-advised project where Cannavale is cast as the angry psycho who partners up with Paul Dano's depressive psycho in some terrible script worthy of Sundance.

One reason I couldn't get into this show is that it made the music feel bloodless. As someone who loves rock and pop of not just the '70s but of all eras, I never got a sense of how this music can mean so much to the people making this show except as a big marketing tool. As a vital, living and breathing element in their lives, none of that came across. I would rather spend an hour watching DeNiro as Johnny Boy breaking out in spontaneous dance to the sound of "Mickey's Monkey" jumping out of Charlie's car than watch another episode of this show.

His moves when he's up on the pool table in that basement joint owe at least a little to Jagger.

hearthesilence wrote:...One reason I couldn't get into this show is that it made the music feel bloodless...

I can't disagree with you, but if you think Vinyl made the music feel bloodless, you may want to avoid Cameron Crowe's new SHOWTIME show Roadies which has all the passion of an hour-long pharmaceutical commercial.

I actually find that Roadies has a lot of reverence, devotion, and attachment for the actual music and musicians that they feature on their show. I find that their biggest problem is that the affection that surrounds the show feels misguidedly applied to the artificial band that they depict and that they kind of misjudge the audience's tolerance for sentiment (which tends to happen with most Crowe projects). Some of the problem is the same fundamental struggle of Studio 60..., where the fake band that is supposed to be so transcendent to the characters within the show comes off as a construct created through a focus-group (I guess that's the pharmaceutical commercial part you mentioned). So far I think it's been a wise decision not to actually show much of their actual performance or music, because there's no way that it could come off as authentic, but even the hints we receive about them feel totally counterfeit. However, the other bands that are set-up as opening acts within the narrative are actually treated fairly well by Crowe and his collaborators and their appreciation for their performances seems genuine since Crowe provides them with a lot of leeway to operate and express themselves on their own terms. Unfortunately then he requires the artists to try acting in actual scenes, which is less successful.

Anyway, that last episode with Rainn Wilson portraying a pretentious music critic was awful for many reasons.