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Reviews
Vinyl (2016)
Getting much better, has slowly gone from absolutely terrible to weak
The show, as a music show, is simply not good and the writers know it. They're not confident of the quality of the story, so they added story lines like murder, police investigation and mafia. If that's not enough, there's a lot of namedropping, cameos and such, as well as over-the-top "edgy" sex and drugs, orgies and excessive drug use - the show is simply trying too hard and it's very obvious.
A good show doesn't need a mafia story to keep it interesting. It doesn't need a murder or a police investigation. It shows how weak the makers think their own show is. The show is suffering from a major identity crisis and is looking desperately for personality. Is it an "edgy" show with lots of gratuitous sex and drug use? Edgy? No. Wanna-be? Most definitely.
Add marital problems, extra-marital affairs, gambling and random things that have little to do with music and you got yourself a whole mess of ideas, but very little quality and not much to do with music.
The pilot was the worst episode and it eventually gets better to the point where episode 9 (just watched it) is just weak. I'm giving it a generous 4 (episode 9 gets a 4, everything else gets much lower scores).
I think HBO should spend more time writing better scripts and less time rigging IMDb ratings. Taste is subjective, but I'm not buying that 27% think this show is a perfect 10/10 or that 27% think it's 9/10.
The reviews and the ratings don't add up. Seems like the biggest "fans" (bots) of this show are a silent majority.
One last spoiler: the show is supposedly about a record company in major financial troubles, who, despite their "hits" can't get out of the red. Their "hits" are pay-to-play (payola) singles and the vinyls themselves are dumped in landfills but declared as sales. Throwaway IMDb accounts are much easier (and better for the environment.) This is a 4/10 show at best. 6/10 if you've never watched TV before and 7/10 if you're delusional or if your daughter/son is an extra and want the show to go on. Anything above is rigging.
Reviews are bad, ratings are poor and HBO just fired the showrunner. You can get bots to give the show 10/10 on IMDb - too bad you can't get bots to watch the show.
Kill Your Friends (2015)
Terrible, unfunny and cliché-ridden
It became a modern trend to rebrand shockingly poor films as "dark comedies" - it's one rock cliché after another, but it presents a parallel world where A&R people are the rockstars and the rockstars live lives of accountants.
There are no laughs. It's not that absurd. It's just ridiculous.
It follows the same story as Vinyl - if you've seen Vinyl, then this is almost the exact same story. A&R person kills someone, beats him to death with an award/trophy, the slowest, dumbest murder investigation, corruption, hedonism, sex, drugs (nopes, no rock 'n roll, just office workers pretending like they're rock stars).
The show has an arrogant way of pretending "We (record companies) tell you what's cool, what isn't, we tell you what to listen to" and so on. It continues a theme started by certain shows about advertising, but takes it to a whole new level. The problem with that is how far they go and the irreconcilable issues they themselves present with this.
Firstly, they show that they can make any bunch of idiots into rockstars and pop idols, it's all make up, photography, studio work and so on, fine. So the record companies make the stars. They tell the fans what to like and what not to like. Fine. But then they have this incredible fear of missing out on the next big band - what? Didn't you just say you tell people what to like? Didn't you say you can make any nobody into a star? So how do you "miss out"? "I don't want to be the person who said 'no' to band X..." It makes no sense. It's a terrible film made by someone who clearly feels left out. They want to be stars, they want to party like they're stars, but can't, so they pretend that they hold all the power.
In reality this doesn't make sense. It's one massive ego trip and fails to be anything but that.
If you really want to see this film, watch Vinyl instead. Same story, but better made. Vinyl is a 5/10, but it's almost twice as better as this crap.