Review Roundup: Bobby Cannavale Leads HBO's VINYL, from Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger

HBO's music industry drama VINYL makes its official debut tomorrow, on Valentine's Day, but reviews are already rolling in, and we've got the first set! Below, read all the reviews from the show starring Tony nominee Bobby Canavale, with Olivia Wilde, Ray Romano, Max Casella, and more!

Created by Mick Jagger & Martin Scorsese & Rich Cohen and Terence Winter, this new drama series is set in 1970s New York. A ride through the sex- and drug-addled music business at the dawn of punk, disco, and hip-hop, the show is seen through the eyes of a record label president, Richie Finestra, played by Bobby Cannavale, who is trying to save his company and his soul without destroying everyone in his path.

Additional series regulars include Olivia Wilde, Ray Romano, Ato Essandoh, Max Casella, P.J. Byrne, J.C. MacKenzie, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, Juno Temple, Jack Quaid, James Jagger and Paul Ben-Victor. Scorsese, Jagger and Winter executive produce along with Victoria Pearman, Rick Yorn, Emma Tillinger Koskoff, John Melfi, Allen Coulter and George Mastras. Winter serves as showrunner. The 10-episode first season debuts February 14th.

Let's see what the critics had to say!

David Itzkoff, New York Times: To succeed, "Vinyl" will have to fulfill the promise of its sexy subject matter and its superstar producers. And it will have to find a coherent, compelling narrative in a heartfelt if abstract idea about how music defined people's lives in that era.

Dominic Patten, Deadline: On the surface, it may not seem the most appropriate Valentine's Day gift, but if you are as in love with rock'n'roll and storytelling from the likes of Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, and Terence Winter, then HBO's Vinyl is a TV kiss you don't want to miss. Debuting on February 14 with a two-hour pilot directed by the Oscar winner, Vinyl, as I say in my video review above, literally and figuratively rocks.

Tim Goodman, The Hollywood Reporter: Music being such a personal preference, who knows if the show will be a hit for HBO. But creatively it's a thing of real beauty, attempting to tell stories of people absolutely enamored with music on a life-altering level. Cannavale, already established and known to crush a scene on demand, takes his work to an entirely new stratum here - Vinyl pulsates in every scene he's in.

Richard Hell, Stereogum: You come to the series looking for music and what do you get? Bulky Italian-American peacocks so crazed by craving for coke that one of them tears the rear-view mirror off his luxury car for a surface to snort from; or two of them excitedly bashing in the head of a vulgar ally before wrapping his corpse in a table cloth and driving it in a car trunk to a dump spot; a prolonged extreme close-up of a fizzingly dynamic cigarette lighter flame against darkness; nonstop soundtrack of rock and roll, soul, funk, blues, punk, and disco pop music. It's all routine Scorsese shtick, but cheaper.

Cory Barker, TV.com: But sometimes, when unchecked, ambition and enthusiasm move very close to indulgence, and that's where VINYL runs into some trouble... some of the musical performances and INTERLUDES are supremely long, or the show quickly moves from one to another without much of a beat in between them. It's overwhelming, and purposefully so, but when you're asking people to watch for almost two hours in the first week with not a lot of compelling story, it's tough to fully engage with the style.

Robert Lloyd, LA Times: Richie is an antihero in the cable television tradition - Don Draper, Ray Donovan, what have you - and given this, and the phallocentric collected works of Mick and Marty, it's not surprising that "Vinyl" feels more invested in the worst of its men than in the best of its women... Still, the characters are comparatively undercooked. Run, I wanted to tell them, run to a different life, in a different series - I will meet you there.

Richard Lawson, Vanity Fair: Something about Vinyl, despite its best attempts at repellency, proves gradually narcotic. The drip doesn't set in until about the fourth episode, when the series hints at a grander design... Vinyl's most compelling performances are found half-hidden in the backstage shadows. Ato Essandoh makes the strongest impression, playing one of Richie's former talents who, following career-ending tragedy, is working his way back into the game, hungry and vengeful. I love Annie Parisse and Juno Temple as the show's two most ambitious women, Parisse playing a successful publicist with her eye on a bigger brass ring, Temple an office assistant with a canny ear for new talent.

Robert Bianco, USA Today: So why watch this show, set in New York's exploding music world in the early '70s? For one, because for all his faults, Richie has an artist's love of and feel for music. While that may not redeem him, it does make him more interesting than your standard corporate goon. And for another, Richie is played by Bobby Cannavale, who turns in yet another of those startling, career-resetting performances that this golden TV era seems to produce with ferocious regularity.

Ken Tucker, Yahoo: The weakness of Vinyl is embedded in this dramatic structure... Vinyl has nothing new to add to this other than the patented Scorsese pacing and some wizardly editing. He's reaching for a TV show with the grand scale and sweep of Goodfellas; he'll settle for Wolf of Wall Street, but too often, his relative inexperience in series television doesn't make the scenes crackle with the tension than Michael Mann brought decades ago to his own music-fueled TV series such as Miami Vice and Crime Story.

Emily Yoshida, The Verge: Cannavale, a supremely appealing character actor who has appeared memorably in Boardwalk Empire and Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, sells this passion expertly. But the music isn't what sticks. The office is. Any connoisseur of 21st century prestige dramas about difficult boss men will recognize Vinyl's calculus immediately: mercurial figurehead, put-upon right-hand man (a sensitive, wry Ray Romano in this case), struggling female upstart who longs to break out of coffee runs and into the big leagues.

Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker: This is TV's own version of rockism, the presumption that any drama about a genius-thug with a sad wife and a drug habit must be a deep statement about America. The pilot is full of hackneyed motifs, including an introductory voice-over that makes you more nostalgic for "Goodfellas" than for the seventies

Image courtesy of HBO

To post a comment, you must register and login.

Test and expand your Broadway knowledge with our new game - The Broadway Match-Up! How well do you know your Broadway casting trivia?	Play the Daily Game, explore current shows, and delve into past decades like the 2000s, 80s, and the Golden Age. Challenge your friends and see where you rank!
How well do you know your Tony Awards history? Take our never-ending quiz of nominations and winner history and challenge your friends.	Can you beat your friends? Play today’s daily Broadway word game, featuring a new theatrically inspired word or phrase every day!