One of the emblematic aspects of great TV in the glorious period that exists now is the capacity to take viewers inside an extraordinary world. It might be a place we thought we knew. It might be a fantasy world. And then, over 10 or 13 hours, it presents this world as alive, throbbing with depth, complexity, humour and symmetry.
The viewer is transfixed by the complexity, the sense of wonder. Vinyl does that. The critic for the Hollywood Reporter, Tim Goodman, looked at Vinyl, was very impressed and wrote that it "… suggests HBO is hoping this ends up as some kind of rock 'n' roll Game of Thrones – big enough to embrace great swaths of history, story and movement." That's a tantalizing possibility and entirely plausible.
But first – with all due respect to rock-music devotees, music nerds are the worst. In recent weeks I've been in receipt of e-mails telling me what Vinyl gets wrong. The series hasn't aired yet and, unless you're a TV critic or an HBO insider, you haven't seen it.
Vinyl (starts Sunday, HBO Canada, 9 p.m.) gets so much right, actually. It's a stand-back-in-awe experience. And to be clear, you don't, absolutely don't, have to be a pop-music obsessive to savour it. The series achieves that goal of creating a fabulously exotic but knowable world. It's about music, period. The power and grace of it. The energy it instigates, the life-changing, society-changing surge of it.
In the second episode, central character Richie (Bobby Cannavale) makes a disparaging remark about the group Emerson, Lake and Palmer. (Who wouldn't, if you think back to the pomposity of all that progressive rock.) Then he raves excitedly about a band he heard the night before. Let's say it was something like the New York Dolls. He shouts, "Rock 'n' roll! Like the first time you heard it! It's fast, it's dirty – it smashes you over the head!"
Right there, Richie could be talking about any aspect of art. The force it has to make you feel suddenly alive, questioning what you experienced before and eagerly anticipating more of what just hit you.
The story, the bones of it, is at first straightforward but, as the best drama does, subtly signals there are layers of history that will arise to enrich the narrative. It's 1973. Richie owns the record label American Century, which isn't doing well but isn't worthless, either. He's having meetings with the German-run Polygram Records, who want to buy him and his pals out of American Century. It means that his old sidekicks, accountant Skip (J.C. MacKenzie) and PR guy Zak (Ray Romano) could get a big payoff and walk away wealthy.
But Richie is reluctant. He started American Century and made it great because his gut told him that the future was in rock 'n' roll. His gut tells him now that if he can just find the next big thing – no matter what it is – he can keep his company and tell the Germans where to get off. He just has to navigate for a while through the music world and find the thing that makes you feel alive again, smashed over the head by it.
But what a world to navigate. A world in which the PR guys deliver a new record to a DJ armed with a bag of cocaine and the promise of a hooker later. A world in which radio-station owners stage parties that are orgies of drugs and sex, and bill the record label. Since Mick Jagger is an executive producer and presented the idea for Vinyl to Martin Scorsese, you know that none of this is far-fetched.
The first episode, a two-hour epic, is directed by Scorsese, and it seethes, visually, musically and emotionally. This is, after all, where Scorsese started – the seamy streets of New York in the early 1970s, the setting for his Mean Streets. What's astonishing is the pace and rhythm of it – the propulsive beat of music saturates it. Not like the way a soundtrack propels and heightens a scene, but music woven deeply into the texture of everything. In the end of the episode, there's a scene that has a major filmmaker's flourish – the sort of over-the-top visual-impact flourish that, in truth, isn't necessary. On the evidence of the first batch of episodes, that only happens once. Then the story settles, and is electrically alive, hour after glorious hour.
Vinyl is one of those great, complete pictures of human life inside a very specific universe. An epic narrative set in a place that is at once horrifying and irresistible.
By the way – if you watch, think you know your rock 'n' roll music and have issues with some details of historical verisimilitude, don't write to me. Write to Mick Jagger (c/o HBO should reach him) to complain. It's not like he was there, in this world depicted, right?
Also airing this weekend
The Walking Dead (Sunday, AMC, 9 p.m.) returns for the second half of this season. As we know from the last episode, Rick Grimes and his posse are trying to escape a zombie horde that has penetrated the walls of the previously safe town of Alexandria. There will be bloodshed, betrayal and mistakes. As always. But worse is coming. The character billed as "the most dangerous adversary imaginable" is about to confront the Grimes group. Anything that came before was amateur hour. He is Negan, an ultraviolent lunatic played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. Negan's group is called the Saviors and there is a sickening irony to that.
The series is part of the fantastical genre of this period of TV drama. Historical verisimilitude is not an issue, but the veracity of the way it depicts human nature, especially behaviour in extreme circumstances, is vital. Its fatalism is profound and bracing. What great days in TV drama.
All times ET. Check local listings.