Did Anybody Watch the ‘Roadies’ Finale?
Between the VMAs and the finale of The Night Of, it would seem unlikely that many people tuned in to see the season (series?) finale of Roadies but, then again, over the past few weeks, I’ve noticed a slight increase in Roadies-awareness in my Twitter feed and elsewhere. There seems to be a revisionist opinion settling in about Cameron Crowe’s Showtime series: Yes, it’s not great, but on its own terms, it’s certainly the mainstream-rock nostalgia-machine + good-acting show to watch if you can get past its ceaseless Eddie Vedder-worship.
Or, even more to the point, its Phil-worship. In the final weeks of Roadies, the show turned the road manager, played by comedian Ron White, into the spiritual-guru-reason-for-existence of not just the roadies, not just the Staton-House Band, but for the series itself. Phil embodied everything creator Cameron Crowe wanted to get at about how the rock and roll lifestyle can be a nurturing family circus. The character did this so thoroughly, Crowe and co-writer Winnie Holzman chose to immortalize Phil by having his corpse stuffed by a taxidermist (on super-short notice, I might add) and mounted, with outstretched arms, for every key player to hug at the end of the hour-plus episode.
Pause a minute to take that in: Roadies was ultimately about a paunchy loudmouth who told endless stories about Lynyrd Skynyrd and died giving Kelly Ann (Imogen Poots) a nickname. SPOILER: It’s “Pistachio.” Named after a horse he used to bet on. So a prominent star of the series, should it continue, will be known by the equine nickname “bestowed” upon her, as the show so grandly phrased it, by a gaseous probable-gambling-addict.
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The finale was titled “The Load-Out,” after the Jackson Browne song of the same name about (what else?) roadies. It was written by Crowe and Holzman and directed by Crowe. The episode was constructed around a memorial service for Phil, at which numerous stars from the Cameron Crowe/Rolling Stone magazine pantheon performed, such as Browne, Vedder (of course), and Jim James, as well as Gary Clark Jr. and Robyn Hitchcock. Everything Phil-related was equal parts awkward, mawkish, and bottom-line lovable in its utter lack of guile or cynicism.
When I look across the whole season, it’s clear that Crowe and company knew where they wanted to end, but between the pilot and the finale, a lot got improvised: Characters that initially seemed important got stranded by the narrative wayside, and various subplots were just left flapping in the breeze. While it’s likely Crowe sold Showtime on the idea that Roadies would be very much about a view of the rock world as seen through the eyes of a young woman (Poots’s Pistachio), he ultimately could not help but swing back to the people he was really interested in, star-crossed lovers Shelli (Carla Gugino) and Bill (Luke Wilson). In the end, Shelli rejected her husband in favor of Bill.
So if that’s the end of the road for Roadies, it’s a happy ending to a very long, uneven, but successfully personal Cameron Crowe movie-for-television. If Roadies goes into a second season, it’s got a lot of work to do to make it engaging again. But at least with Phil dead and stuffed, we won’t have to listen to anymore Lynyrd Skynyrd anecdotes. I love Skynyrd myself, but as the late Ronnie Van Zant once sang, “Oooh, that smell, the smell of death surrounds you.”
