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Positive:
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Mixed:
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Negative:
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Critic Reviews
Feb 11, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Mr. Cannavale’s performance reaches the heights of magnificence. There’s much more that’s stellar both in the cast--Olivia Wilde is outstanding as Devon, Richie’s hopelessly loving wife--and in the writing.... For its creators and its fine cast, this exuberant, hard-eyed and altogether wonderful evocation of an era gone by seems also to have worked out as planned.
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Feb 9, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Big, noisy and crazy brilliant HBO series.... The performances are masterful on every level, beginning with Cannavale’s Richie Finestra, who is only occasionally capable of keeping his inner turmoil of rage, ambition and fear of failure from exploding to the surface. With his performance, Cannavale vaults to the top of the list of Emmy candidates.
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Feb 9, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The pilot for the musical drama Vinyl is one of Martin Scorsese’s best films, an explosion of amplifier feedback, nose candy, wide-lapeled shirts, and borderline chaos; the next four episodes are almost as good, and on the basis of the first half-season, it already feels like the first new must-see series of 2016.
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Feb 10, 2016
Season 1 Review:
If the point is to spare no expense in attempting to make a flawless, fascinating premium cable narrative about a set of people--mostly men with enormous egos--who have extreme and often criminal problems in a glamorous period setting, then this is precisely what HBO has accomplished--again.... Through characters like Devon, Jamie and Lester, Vinyl has very thoughtfully dotted its i’s and crossed its t’s in terms of diversity, but testosterone is still clearly HBO’s most addictive (and preferred) substance.
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Feb 11, 2016
Season 1 Review:
What follows is a sometimes humorous, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes bumpy ride through the era, with a story that often seems to halt just when it’s picking up momentum. Still, every time the story falters, the characters’ and the show’s obvious love for popular music in all its forms lifts it back up.
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Feb 12, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Boardwalk Empire took a more layered view of the Prohibition ’20s, whereas Vinyl’s main takeaway is that everything used to be cooler, sexier, and more fun. That message will resonate for some, and strike others as a sermon about the redemptive power of rock delivered directly to the choir.
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Uncle BarkyFeb 11, 2016
Season 1 Review:
It’s all very, very ambitious, with hits that keep on coming while storyline misses seem to be almost beside the point. Vinyl is thoroughly rousing at its core, a crazed, dope-filled, sometimes dopey trip that begins in 1973 and has nothing in common with the earlier, comparatively sedate decade brought to you by AMC’s Mad Men.
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Feb 16, 2016
Season 1 Review:
At times there seems to be too much going on in the pilot, between Richie running away from gun-wielding lunatics, attempting to sign new talent, working to keep his existing roster, finagling a deal to sell his company and balancing his precarious home life. But it’s no greater a flaw than most pilots attempting to set up the scheme of things face, and the action never seems bogged down or tied up in specifics.
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TV Guide MagazineFeb 11, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The best parts of the occasionally overwrought Vinyl depict the whirlwind of hustling required to keep American Century solvent and relevant, with funky, sometimes funny subplots. [15-28 Feb 2016, p.16]
Feb 3, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Vinyl works best when it laser-focuses on the nature of the very particular communal passions that fuel the industry, often revealed through Richie, Zak and Skip's characters.... Where the series does sometimes get a little sluggish is in the non-music-focused stories.
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Feb 12, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Head of promotions/payola master Zak Yankovich (Ray Romano), giftedly shady head of sales Skip Fontaine (J.C. MacKenzie), and ill-fated artist Lester Grimes (Ato Essandoh) are among the engaging characters who could ensure that Vinyl lives as much more than a destination for leisure suits, coke noses, and Foghat.
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Feb 10, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Through five episodes, there's an awful lot of excess in Vinyl, which perhaps makes sense for a show involving two icons of '70s rock in Jagger and Scorsese. But all of Richie's searching for the next idea, and all of the scenes involving the Nasty Bits or other rising forms of music, suggest a show that really wishes it could strip away all the glam and all the tropes and just do something simple and raw and powerful.
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Feb 9, 2016
Season 1 Review:
It’s plenty interesting stuff, including the various creative forces at play in the era, as well as its seamier aspects. Yet even with the benefit of a two-hour launch, the premiere unfolds in a manner that can feel as scattered and undisciplined as the headlining acts--not just in its bouncing chronology, but the extended, dreamlike sequences that seek to convey.
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Feb 11, 2016
Season 1 Review:
It would be nice to report that Vinyl sustains the momentum Mr. Scorsese establishes in the pilot, but through five episodes, it tends to bog down.... But the show quickly begins giving less time to the music and more to duller, formulaic plot lines including a marital crisis, a murder investigation and a female secretary’s attempts to break the hemp ceiling of the recording business. You might want to keep “Vinyl” spinning, though, if only for Bobby Cannavale’s smart, sardonic portrayal of Richie Finestra.
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Feb 9, 2016
Feb 12, 2016
Season 1 Review:
There’s so much [music] here, Vinyl runs the risk of turning into “Treme,” which seemed to be a music show with a touch of plot. Vinyl spins back years with copious flashbacks, and they do Cannavale and the show no favors. No matter the year, no matter how his hair is parted, he looks the same, a middle-aged guy. Some things can’t be finessed.
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Feb 16, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Given the technical excellence of the production, your reaction will vary on your liking for the kind of people the filmmakers have chosen to focus on.... Nevertheless, after watching something like half the season, they strike me as unbearably tiresome and uninteresting.
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Feb 12, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Vinyl drags in its occasionally predictable, too infrequently surprising premiere and invites viewers down a rough road. It feels authentic; it looks and sounds believable. But the situations and characters in Vinyl are overly familiar in this post-antihero, peak TV era.
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Feb 12, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Scorsese and Winter and a whole host of talented episode writers and directors including Jonathan Tropper (Banshee), S. J. Clarkson, Debora Cahn, and Adam Rapp labor mightily to bend you to the will of Richie Finestra--to see and hear the music the way he does, as full of endless innovation and possibility--but too often, Vinyl traps you in a familiar cycle of sex and drugs and rock & roll.
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Feb 12, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The show is as expertly shot and acted as its pedigree would suggest, with each episode serving up a few scenes of frightening tension. But the overarching plot of a man trying to rediscover purity in a corrupt world is not a complication of the already over-documented milieu Vinyl exists in. It is exactly the story rock has told about itself time and again, and not a ton is gained in the retelling here.
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Feb 11, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Vinyl is a compelling idea in search of a compelling story. There simply isn’t much of one, in fact, and--abhorring the ever-present vacuum--a lot of other elements rush in to fill the void. Scenes are padded, lots of flashbacks are even more flaccid, while actors devour the helpless scenery.
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Feb 12, 2016
Season 1 Review:
To be sure, there are some fine performances, notably by Olivia Wilde as Richie’s former Warhol girl wife; Juno Temple as an ambitious gofer who wants to work her way up; and Ray Romano as Richie’s beleaguered right-hand man. But they’re mostly drowned in the confusion as the show veers from drama to farce to mostly poor musical interludes.
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