The Dangers of Not Enough Alternative in Your History

I LOVE COCAINE SO MUCH

Like a man paralyzed with fear as he watches a horrible auto accident, I continue to tune into HBOs Vinyl now and then. The wonders of the digital age on my cable company’s circa-2005 technology allows me to time shift to my heart’s desire, which means a show like Vinyl that would get skipped hard if I had to choose between it and several other, much better shows actually gets watched in the wee small hours when I’m bored and tired. While being bored and tired when watching a show might not be the ideal headspace for appreciating art, it is the ideal headspace for undercooked prestige dramas.

Vinyl has its pleasures, but it remains an unsatisfying slog of a show filled with a clichéd antihero lead character and plenty of overblown self-importance. Overall, I’d give the show so far a hard C+, but something’s been bothering me about it from the get go, something that has nothing to do with the characters or the dialog or even the fact that the lead character is so awful (seriously, if you haven’t watched the show and want to know what the character of Richie Finestra [Bobby Cannavale] is like, imagine Don Draper on a bloaty, self-hating binge but then remove all his charisma and magnetism and any sort of redeeming artistic sense of beauty). I finally figured it out: It’s the half-measure alternative history of the show.

This is why watching or reading not-great works can still be profitable for a writer, because the failures can crystallize concepts for you. Put simply, Vinyl demonstrates that if you’re going to tell an alternative history story, you must be prepared to actually change history.

Vinyl As a Work of Sci Fi

Is Vinyl, the story of a record executive in the early 1970s, science fiction? No, of course not—except it kind of is, because Vinyl exists in that mainstay of SF stories, the alternate history. Richie Finestra isn’t just a fictional character at a fictional record company, he’s supposedly a heavy-hitter who’s the principle shareholder of a major record company. A company that has a reasonable chance of signing, say, Alice Cooper or Elvis to its roster.

And the show has fun with that, having actors portray some of the biggest stars of the time, and imagining they’re actually on the American Century label or being pursued by the team of A&R people working there. David Bowie shows up. Robert Goulet (!) shows up. A host of lesser-known stars of the era show up. The impersonations vary in quality and effectiveness, but the key here is that a plot point in several episodes has been American Century, a label in serious financial trouble, keeps trying to woo big stars onto their label. And it keeps failing, for the simple reason that those stars never signed with American Century, because American Century didn’t actually exist.

In other words, things like this keep happening: A hapless A&R guy, his job on the line if he can’t sign a new act, has a random run-in with Alice Cooper, who in 1973 was a huge rock star. So the hapless A&R guy spends a boozy, exhausting weekend wooing Cooper and trying to convince him to leave his band and go solo on American Century. That’s all fine, because it’s 100% possible that Alice Cooper was in fact wooed by a wide variety of A&R guys from a wide range of labels and no one was there to snap photos and write breathless accounts of it. But of course we all know that Cooper didn’t go solo until 1975, and when Cooper humiliates our hapless A&R guy because he hates Finestra and American Century, there’s no surprise. So far Vinyl has proved unwilling to actually re-write history too much, so we know it won’t take Alice Cooper from fictional version of a real person into the realm of 100% fictional character. That makes all the cameos by 1970s rock stars pointless. We know what will or won’t happen.

And so, Vinyl turns to fictional rock stars for the actual kinetic storytelling, inventing someone like Hannibal, an R&B superstar, so American Century can actually have a contract in play that won’t break history. That’s fine, but mixing the fake and the real just underscores the problem: Vinyl‘s unwilling to change history in service of its alternate version of history, and if an alternate history is kind of exactly the same as actual history, what’s the point?

Meet The Drapers

Mad Men danced the same dance: Set in the advertising world of the 1960s, it had a fake ad man in Draper, working at a fake advertising firm, but working with real-life products. And it works, for two reasons. One, people (or at least: me) are much less familiar with the shadowy world of advertising. In other words, as far as most people are concerned, Don Draper might as well have come up with the “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” campaign, because most normal people have no fucking idea who actually did it.

Two, Mad Men did in fact change history many times on the show, in the sense that it often had real products and real companies hire Don and company to work on campaigns for them. Heck, the Coke Ad in the finale is an actual campaign, a famous campaign, and Matt Weiner just decided that in the Mad Men version of the universe it was invented by Don Draper, and screw reality.

Mad Men is also assisted by the fact that large corporations often did and do have several advertising firms on the payroll, so it doesn’t break any rules to imagine the boutique-style firms Draper worked at might not have picked up an account here and there.

Vinyl has no such luxury, since rock stars are only signed to one label at a time. Teasing us that Richie might sign Led Zeppelin in 1973 instead of watching them get their own Swan Song label is only exciting if we think it might actually happen in the alternate universe of the show. Once we figure out that stuff like that is never going to happen, we get bored. When Richie sits down with a bloated Elvis in Vegas and tries to get him to dump his residency and start over with a new label, the audience twiddles its thumbs because the show has established that a major departure from reality like that is never going to happen.

If the show did take those chances, it would instantly be orders of magnitude more interesting. A show where Elvis cleans up, hits the gym, and signs with a demented cokehead record executive desperately trying to make music meaningful in his own life again? That would be interesting for no other reason than it would be 100% unpredictable. As it is, the impersonations of celebrities on Vinyl are only as interesting as the performers’ mimicry skills.