'Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll': Can Denis Leary Become a Rock Star?

I’m pretty sure Denis Leary did not intend for his new show Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll to be interpreted this way, but, hey, rock and roll makes up its rules as it goes along: This FX series premiering Thursday makes a very good case for the notion that there’s no such thing as authenticity in rock music.

Never one to go for subtlety, Leary stars as a musician named Johnny Rock, a 50-year-old cult star who, we’re supposed to believe, could have been a big star if only he hadn’t feuded with the Keith Richards to his Mick Jagger, his co-writer/lead-guitarist Flash (John Corbett, whose achievement here is extending his wastrel-musician character from Parenthood into complete degeneracy). Johnny, who still struts around with a rooster hairdo lifted from the head of Rod Stewart circa Gasoline Alley, broke up the band and has been grasping at fame for about three decades now, when his new meal ticket suddenly arrives.

That meal ticket takes the form of his long-lost daughter, who’s got the youth, pipes, and Instagrammed body to give anyone’s career a boost, and if you think that sounds crude, that is exactly what show-creator Leary wants you to think when you look at and listen to Gigi. She’s played by Elizabeth Gillies, a Broadway and Nickelodeon vet who’s immediately convincing as a young professional with daddy issues who is not above using Johnny as cynically as he plans to use her. A warm family sitcom Sex&Drugs is not.

Neither is it a very funny sitcom. In Rescue Me, Leary had the benefit of co-creator Peter Tolan and a deep bench of talented co-stars to whom he was willing to cede the spotlight. This time around, Leary surrounds himself with good actors who are very much the actor-equivalent of a back-up band, and he crowds Gillies for the spotlight in every scene they share. This is not wise when the punchlines he gives himself include, “I wanna blow Bruce Jenner” and “I’m not writing some auto-tune Katy Perry bulls–t.” Maybe I’d feel more charitable about this had Leary not co-opted the title of a great Ian Dury song and failed to make his own, self-written theme song one-thousandth as good.

You’re supposed to think Johnny Rock is a jerk who’s actually heroic because he’s fighting for the rebel spirit of rock, but I’ll bet there are a lot of viewers who’ll identify more with Gigi, a realist who’s fighting for the freedom that comes with being a pop star nowadays. In Gigi’s cosmos — and mine — Katy Perry is as legit as Steven Tyler, or Jon Bon Jovi, or any other rocker the show invokes.

TV and rock and roll have a history as long as both mediums. Not just Elvis Presley wiggling from the waist-up on The Ed Sullivan Show, but also Ricky Nelson smuggling future Presley guitarist James Burton onto the otherwise-anodyne The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (1952-’66). From The Monkees to Empire, television shows that use pop music as a metaphor for freedom, fame, and wealth have always been compromised projects, some better than others.

Now that rock is merely one genre among many from which a singer like Gigi plucks a melody or tempo, the bottom-line message of Sex&Drugs — that one kind of music is privileged with a unique truth — is undercut by what’s actually onscreen: the spectacle of a deluded rocker being aced by a shrewd pop-ster.

Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on FX.