The Get Down

In an age where Netflix seems to be greenlighting anything with a mildly amusing title, The Get Down promised to be a good quantity of top quality.

The PR machine behind the show made as much as can possibly be made of the show’s co-creator and director/writer, Baz Luhrmann.  Lo, trumpeted the features in Sunday supplements read only by Brexit-voters, the director of films that everyone loves such as Moulin Rouge has only gone and decided that TV is indeed the new Hollywood and taken his attentions there.  From start to finish, The Get Down is unmistakably Luhrmannesque.  At least, that sentence sounds like a nice way of describing the whole thing, but it isn’t strictly true.

Each episode opens with footage of an indeterminate rapper spitting rhymes about his youth in the ghetto.  For a few moments, I thought I had clicked the wrong thing and was watching an identikit hiphopper in concert by mistake.  But no, this is the show’s framing.  Books, our hero, must have made it then.  But, even as I type this, I am not sure.  Cue a return to the nostalgia and vintage of late seventies New York and, more specifically, The Bronx.

I’m not going to harp on about the alleged budget per episode.  Whatever it was, it was completely worth it.  An air of menace from real crime and violence is maintained in the face of quite frankly “musical” musical numbers.  Vivid colours and unreal characters lace together to create something that feels historically accurate.  From a deep immersion into the era of disco, the viewer shares the excitement of the characters at the raw and bloody birthing of hip hop.

There are some animated sequences that don’t really add much to an already fantastical production design, and I admit to cringing every time the line “my butterscotch queen” was uttered, mostly because it reminded of my least favourite Angel Delight flavour being served in British primary schools and this couldn’t be further from the look and feel of the show.  There is also an open-ended dalliance into a gay crush which didn’t seem to go anywhere, resulting in something that felt watered down rather than glorious.

Justice Smith is a charismatic lead whose heartfelt rasp scores each episode, while, by contrast, Herizen F. Guardiola’s pure silken voice elevates some of the original songs to Spotify repeat play levels on a par with any of today’s top hits.  Racially, what’s not to love among all this diversity?  Though, I can still tell a character is Hispanic even without them having to say every third word in Spanish, making it all sound a little but like a GCSE listening exercise.

In the boxset stakes, many scoffed at the show’s apparent cancellation after only one series of two parts.  But Baz hadn’t failed.  Each episode is a masterpiece, a mini movie unrestrained by the forty five minute timelength dictated to us from traditional TV advertising.  The show ends because the story is finished.  And lo, again, I did weep at its conclusion, because the characters’ stories had ended too.  I felt a deep sense of having shared their experiences more profoundly than I was expecting.  I might have no chance of ever seeing them again, but I knew they were going to go on to be ok without me.