Daisy Buchanan (TV) Movie Review

In the early seventies, a young girl named Daisy Jones is discovered by singer-songwriter F. Scott Fitzgerald, who casts her in his 1926 Broadway adaptation of his novel Daisy Buchanan. The production thrills audiences, earning a record number of glowing reviews.

After the Dunne Brothers form a Pittsburgh band with their friends Eddie Roundtree, Warren Rojas, and Chuck Loving, tour manager Rod Reyes encourages them to move to Los Angeles. There, they find more success, changing their name to the Six and hiring keyboardist Karen Sirko. They start to win national attention and appear on the cover of Rolling Stone, but Billy descends into drug and alcohol abuse. He cheats on Camila with groupies, and she impulsively flies to Greece.

Reid’s book takes a more ambivalent stance on future music icon Wyatt Stone, who rummages through Daisy’s things to steal her lines for his hit song “Look at Us Now.” Amazon’s rock drama eliminates that detail, obscuring the fact that Daisy was the original songwriter and showing her reluctance to be intimate with others.

Another book difference involves Daisy’s fling with Mi Vida frontman Jim Blades. Reid’s book credited him as the person who gave Daisy the confidence to start performing publicly, but the miniseries omits that detail. The show’s writers may have hoped that eliminating the fling would make it easier for viewers to identify with Daisy and understand her hesitancy to be vulnerable with people romantically. But omitting it also obscures the fact that it was Blades who encouraged her to start performing.