Daisy Jones & The Six and Sciame, two new TV series available on Prime Video

On Prime Video they began on the same day, March 17, and both have the world of music as their backdrop, yet they couldn’t be more different series, in a multitude of respects. One is called Daisy Jones & The Sixand perhaps some listeners have happened to read the novel on which it is based, written by Taylor Jenkins Reid, the author of the bestseller The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo (from which a series is also in the works). The story told in Daisy Jones & The Six starts at the end of the 60s and, despite the names and many details being different, music and gossip enthusiasts have not struggled to recognize the real one of Fleetwood Mac, in particular the tormented relationship between the guitarist Lindsay Buckingham and singer Stevie Nicks.

In reality, the two were already collaborating before joining Fleetwood Mac after Peter Green and the group’s blues roots left, while in the series their fictitious counterparts Billy Dunne and Daisy Jones meet when she crosses paths with his band. The artistic spark is immediate, projecting everyone towards success, but an uncontrollable passion is also triggered, which turns out to be ruinous.

Daisy Jones & The Six, despite the more or less declared inspirations, is a completely invented story, even if the TV series (created by the screenwriters Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, who know about unsettled love stories, having written the film 500 days together and The Fault in Our Stars) is set up as a fake documentary, made many years after the events narrated, in which all the protagonists of the story give interviews directly to the camera.

The narrative pretext lies in a great concert, immediately after which, at the height of success, Daisy Jones & The Six dissolve, without explaining to anyone why. Now, finally, they say they are willing to reveal the truth. The protagonist of the series is played by Riley Keough, who in addition to being an established actress especially in American independent cinema, and having made her directorial debut at the last Cannes Film Festival, is also the granddaughter of Elvis Presley, daughter of the only daughter of the re, Lisa Marie (disappeared suddenly on January 12). Despite the family heritage – in addition to her grandfather and mother, her father, Danny Keough, is also a musician – Riley studied singing and music specifically for the series, and numerous contemporary stars – such as Phoebe Bridgers and Marc Mumford – have participated in the column sound (an entire album of unreleased songs was released, entitled Aurora).

At the antipodes of Daisy Jones & The Six and her troubled but also nostalgic and glamorous Seventies, there is Sciame (or Swarm in the original), the latest work by Donald Glover, already author of the seminal TV series Atlanta and himself an acclaimed musician under the stage name of Childish Gambino. If in Daisy Jones the point of view is that of the stars, in Swarm the perspective is that of the fans, and the setting is not a golden and idealized past but our gloomy present.

Dre, the protagonist, played by the talented Dominique Fishback, is obsessed with her favorite singer, a pop star named Ni’Jah, and is an active member of the community that follows her, the “swarm”. The references here are clearly to Beyoncé – Ni’Jah’s style, both musical and aesthetic, leaves no doubt, and even the name of the fandom, “swarm”, recalls the bee-hive, the “beehive”, the as the followers of the Texan superstar are called.

Swarm is a disturbing and biting horror thriller, and follows Dre’s descent into hell after the death of his best friend (who, by the way, is played by Chloe Bailey, one half of the r’n’b duo Chloe x Halle, launched by Beyoncé himself). The cast includes well-known names from the contemporary music world, including the unstoppable Billie Eilish, but one of the screenwriters also attracts attention, that of Malia Obama, daughter of the former US president, who makes her debut as the author of a episode, the fifth, signed with the co-creator of the series Janine Nabers.

Imperfect, deliberately disturbing, unpredictable and provocative, Sciame is an acute representation of the drifts of today’s fandoms, of the fixation for celebrities raised to the level of divinities, and of the dark side to which musical passion can reach: not a new phenomenon, but which in the the age of the internet and social media risks blurring and making the boundaries between reality and artifice unrecognizable.