The last 20 minutes of Daisy Jones & The Six’s premiere are electric

polygon.com:

For better or for worse, the first three episodes of Daisy Jones & The Six (which debuted today on Prime Video) are mostly about getting everyone in the right place at the right time, with the right mindset.

Before Daisy Jones (played by Riley Keough) meets the Six, she is a free-spirited groupie turned aspiring songwriter in Los Angeles, while they’re a brother-led band from the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Based on the book of the same name, Daisy Jones and the Six will eventually recount the story of the band’s greatest performance — and how they all splintered apart right after it.

But before that happens, before Daisy and the Six inevitably collide, creators Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber attempt to build up who they are and what they want, just like the book did. But while the book’s structure could be used for a faster-paced and generally more interesting exposition, the show feels burdened down by trying to keep the book’s format. That is, until the last moments of the third episode, which finally indicate just how compelling the show could become.

[Ed. note: This post contains some spoilers for the first three episodes ofDaisy Jones & The Six, and some book spoilers.]

Daisy Jones & The Six — the book, not the show — is structured as an oral history, with different characters recounting the same experience from their own point of view to the fictional author. It’s a key part of the story that all comes to a head in the climax, which brings the author into the fold and reveals a crucial twist. The show tries to replicate this by turning it into a talking heads-style documentary. But having characters summarize what a flashback just showed on screen is less compelling than piecing together what happened from