It makes business sense – the book, which has sold over a million copies, has a built-in fanbase.

That’s surprising, in that there are plenty of reasons why the book seemed perfectly suited for television: the 70s nostalgia the descriptions of alchemical live performances the inevitable love triangle between Daisy, Billy and his unfailingly supportive wife Camila (Camila Morrone) the book’s oral history format, which translates into characters reflecting on their past in a 90s documentary à la Behind the Music. It’s a diet soda version of love, lust and 70s music, a heavily promoted shrug. Many reviewers have accurately pointed out that the 10-hour series feels surprisingly small and artificial, at once too long and not enough. It’s the fundamental issue plaguing Daisy Jones & the Six, an intended tent-pole series and one of the biggest bets in Reese Witherspoon’s gushing book-to-screen pipeline that, for all its alleged volcanic chemistry, has fizzled on impact. That ineffable quality – the reason why some people pop on screen, why Keough’s volatile charisma worked here, or why the Six and millions of other people worldwide fell for Daisy in the novel’s tale of creative ecstasy and implosion – is difficult to reverse-engineer. There’s a shiver of excitement – not for the music, which is just fine, nor for the first “performance” of Daisy Jones & the Six, which plays out as you’d expect (serviceable to us, catnip to the fans) and which band members promptly tell us was special, but for a fleeting glimpse of the mercurial, magnetic, destabilizing thing that is star power.

The ensuing rendition of Look at Us Now (Honeycomb), a clear homage to Fleetwood’s The Chain that did get stuck in my head for several days, was palpably stressful, in the way that people being chaotic and potentially embarrassing in front of other people makes me immediately reach for the pause button. It’s a rare unpredictable scene in a show rife with rock’n’roll cliches and 70s facsimiles.

After i do pa taylor jenkins reid