Rev Rank: Is ‘Daisy Jones and The Six’ better than the book or does Amazon make a good thing bad?

Rating: 9/10 

As a massive fan of the book, I was already hopeful going into the show “Daisy Jones and The Six.”

I trusted Amazon Prime to deliver an accurate book adaptation after being pleasantly surprised by the production of “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” which was also a book adaptation by Amazon Prime.  

The budget for “Daisy Jones and The Six” was immaculate, and the songs I read from the book coming to life were a dream come true. The fact that I can listen to the whole “Aurora” album after falling in love with it on the page is a surreal experience. 

I noticed slight differences from the book when watching the show, even though it’s been a few years since I read it. These creative liberties were not necessarily bad, but I did question the purpose behind some of the decisions. 

The main difference from the book was the writers taking Daisy and Billy’s purely emotional connection from the books and making it more physical in the show. We were always led to believe that every member of the band was an unreliable narrator up to a point, so it wasn’t the biggest shock to see that Daisy and Billy had acted on their unspoken feelings. 

I was not a huge Camila Dunne fan in the book because I was admittedly more focused on the amount of serotonin I was getting from Daisy and Billy’s dynamic. However, I was able to connect with her in the show the way I never was able to in the book.

She seemed more realistic than the doting wife I remembered. Camila was played by Camila Morrone, who I think delivered some of the most impressive acting performances of anyone in the show. 

Sam Claflin as Billy Dunne and Riley Keough as Daisy Jones were also showstoppers. You can tell how much they cared about their characters and how much they wanted to do them justice.

I was worried about how the show would handle Billy’s rehab storyline, and when it showed him breaking down in Teddy’s car, I could feel the weight of Billy’s guilt in that moment because of Claflin’s performance. 

I also enjoyed Karen and Graham’s storyline, but I was annoyed by how the show decided to put the two together. Instead of the book scene where Karen tells Graham he has a shot with her and he sprints to her hotel room, we get another girl involved as collateral damage.

I didn’t see the purpose beyond making Graham’s girlfriend a plot device for Karen’s jealousy, as it caused cheating where there hadn’t been any and made Karen and Graham’s relationship feel more shallow.  

However, the final episode that tells the tale of the band breaking up was one of my favorite episodes of television I had ever seen. The decision to open with the last performance the band would ever have and then go back in time to chronologically tell the audience why they were all falling apart was incredibly well done.

There were hurt feelings and egos everywhere; the only one who made it out unscathed was the effortlessly cool drummer, Warren Rojas. He had to deal with the fallout of the band breaking up because his bandmates couldn’t be professional, but at least he got to marry a movie star. 

All in all, this was one of the best book adaptations I’ve ever seen. The writing, the acting and the set design all fell perfectly into place.

If only it had found a way to include the line “And baby, when you think of me / I hope it ruins rock ‘n roll.”