‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’: Personality Crisis
Photo: FX
Arriving for its second season Thursday night, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll is placed against a new rock-music-TV landscape. Since we last saw the Denis Leary music-biz sitcom, HBO’s Vinyl arrived with a splash, was greeted with damp enthusiasm, and was drowned by its network. Roadies — about the sort of behind-the-scenes people Leary’s Johnny Rock would probably order around condescendingly if Johnny were a bigger star — has premiered on Showtime to a lukewarm response. So how do new episodes of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll — hereafter referred to as SDRR — look in this current context? Like the odd, gnarly oldies act they are.
Leary’s Johnny remains a keeper of the flame of rock-music “authenticity,” if you call maintaining Rod Stewart’s ancient rooster-cut a sign of authenticity. His daughter, Gigi (Elizabeth Gillies), is believable as the band’s lead singer only if you invent a backstory as to why a young woman of Gigi’s obvious talent would stay with this group. Mine is that, exposed to both her father’s old albums and the awful pop-music phenomenon American Idol as a kid, Gigi grew up thinking that overemoting behind a barrage of guitar chords was entertainment for the masses and a ticket to fame.
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The new episodes push the show’s recurring theme — too old to rock ’n’ roll, too young to die — heavily. The opener uses the occasion of the death of a singer the band used to work with as an occasion to take stock (“First David Bowie, that was a big thing for both of us…”) and to engage in a little YOLO behavior — in this case, Johnny and Ava (Elaine Hendrix) engage in a threesome while Gigi experiments with same-sex romps. Along the way, the show persists in making those awful tribute-band jokes it’s made from the start: A new episode cites Lez Zeppelin and Vage Halen, which really ends up being the same joke separated by a few minutes.
When the band finds some old VHS tapes it wants to play, Johnny says, “Where are we gonna find a VCR? Those things are more extinct than Toto — the band, not the dog.” That line suggests one problem with SDRR: It feels compelled to explain its own jokes, inaccurately thinking it’s too hip for its audience. The joke would have been mildly amusing if he’d just left it at the Toto reference, but it really dies a mirthless death by explaining what Toto is and spelling out the Wizard of Oz reference.
When Johnny comes up with the idea for a new band and describes its potential sound as “a Hives meet the Who and they get drunk with David Johansen vibe,” I felt like someone was reading aloud a 30-year-old Rolling Stone review to me. SDRR places itself in the awkward position of having created — when you fold in John Corbett’s Flash — some likable characters (well, maybe not Johnny, but that’s the way Leary likes it; he’s a preening antihero to the end) who remain in search of the right vehicle to take them to another level of excellence.
Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll airs Thursday nights at 10 p.m. on FX.
