‘The Get Down’ Has Big Beating Heart Underneath That $120 Million Price Tag

It’s the Bronx in 1977; buildings are on fire, subways are covered in graffiti, disco is in the air, and hip-hop is underground. Culturally, historically, almost anthropologically, something new is about to be birthed into this sweaty primordial soup. And not just something new but someone. Someone who sounds a lot like Nas and looks a lot like Daveed Diggs is about to emerge as a self-made hip-hop superstar, and Baz Luhrmann is on hand to make sure that there’s enough freedom, beauty, truth, and love to last an entire TV season, if not more.

The Get Down is a television show that deserves to be seen on its merits, if only because it’s the kind of singular production that isn’t being undertaken anywhere else. It’s reaching for a LOT: a multi-layered story about a group of teen boys discovering hip-hop (and in particular Grandmaster Flash), an aspiring disco diva trying not to get eaten alive, a local entrepreneur/organizer/gangster with big plans to renovate the Bronx, a lady crime boss straight out of the Roaring ’20s operating out of the local disco, religion, politics, Ed Koch, cocaine, a citywide blackout, and that’s just the first three episodes. That these first few episodes can’t keep all those plates spinning isn’t surprising, but I’m also not yet ready to say it’s damning, either.

The thing is, now everybody knows what it cost. Reports of a $120 million figure attached to the production of The Get Down is not just an eye opener for Netflix business practices. It’s also now an incredibly lofty standard for The Get Down to reach. Scrutiny will be close and Luhrmann’s excesses might as well have dollar signs next to them. To me, though, this is less excess than ambition. There are no green fairies flitting through the frame here; no gaudy production numbers. Rather, the tone is something closer to street-level myth-making. The wider the show casts its net — the more we focus on, say, Jimmy Smits as a local crooked (if communiy-positive) businessman or Lillias White as crime boss Fat Annie — the more that ambition starts to overshadow what is a rather compelling story at the center.

That story at the center is a very simple one: Ezekiel (Justice Smith) is a South Bronx teen who writes poetry in his notebook but won’t read it aloud in front of the class. His parents having both been killed by gun violence, his poetry is of the scarred, wounded, prince-of-the-streets variety. He and his friends get wrapped up in tales of what goes on at the local disco and a legendary graffiti tagger named Shaolin Fantastic (Shameik Moore). Meanwhile, Ezekiel is in love with Mylene (Herizen F. Guardiola), who has her own dreams of being a disco singer. Shaolin and Ezekiel meet in a way that’s fateful in the way that myths are fateful, and by the end of the first episode, Shaolin is introducing Ezekiel and his friends to an underground music scene featuring a DJ named Grandmaster Flash.

That right there is the story. Smith, Moore, and Guardiola are all giving fantastic performances, and while their characters’ ambitions are familiar — they want to make it, they want to live their dreams — their stories have a specificity that make them compelling. Watching Ezekiel and Shaolin take lessons from Grandmaster Flash (played here by Mamoudou Athie) and essentially discover the building blocks of hip-hop is both fascinating and exciting. The second episode features a runner with a purple crayon that is satisfyingly process-y on the subject of music-making. And as familiar as it is, Ezekiel and Mylene’s love story is passionately felt. Justice Smith is a real find here, playing Ezekiel as a roiling cauldron of teen emotions, ambition, pride, and love without ever coming across as bratty in the way teens who check those four boxes often do. There is a lava-hot core of something at the center of this kid, and it’s riveting to see it burst out.

The problem, especially in the 92-minute premiere episode, is that the good parts of the show take a while to break through all the other parts of the show. And with $120 million hanging over the proceedings, viewer patience might be at a premium. Here again is where the ambition of The Get Down is a blessing and a curse. The idea is to show the late-’70s music scene in New York as the birthplace of a Colossus that it was. Hip-hop was about to change everything we knew about music and re-shape the cultural landscape for the next 40 years and counting. Why shouldn’t that be treated like the world-shaking event that it was? Why isn’t it worthy of a “Great TV” show? But creating “Great TV” in the 21st century means painting a wide canvass.

Ever since shows like The Sopranos and The Wire and Deadwood set the template, great TV shows were defined as shows that took a holistic view of their subjects. By casting a wide net over the ’77 Bronx, by focusing on politics and crime and housing and the generation gap and on and on, the idea is to tell a story not about some kids but about a community. This is not only admirable, it’s the stuff of a potentially dazzling TV series. But The Get Down doesn’t have it yet. Smits is a dynamic performer, but every time we have to cut away from Ezekiel and Shao learning how to work dual turntables to watch Smits make some kind of business deal, it falls flat. Similarly, the goings on at Annie’s disco club Les Inferno feel like a completely different show, at least in the pilot. And while that storyline provides the show its best villain in Annie’s hotheaded son Cadillac (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), the addition of an organized-crime element into the story feels like arbitrary stakes-raising.

To be perfectly clear: there is a compelling, fun, and deeply heartfelt TV show in here. And you don’t even have to dig that deep to find it. Episodes 2 and 3 are a marked improvement in terms of foregrounding Ezekiel and his pals, and already the chaos of the city is starting to feel in service to that story rather than the other way around (as it felt at times in the pilot). And while Luhrmann’s ambition may prove challenging, it should also be said that with Luhrmann and co-producer Catherine Martin (4-time Oscar winner for costumes and production design and also Luhrmann’s wife) you get a show that looks dynamite, with a vibrant color palette, hot costumes, and killer sets that already place The Get Down on a higher level than most TV.

Netflix is releasing the first batch of six episodes on August 12th, with the rest of season 1 dropping in 2017. I’m eager to see where the story goes past the first 3 episodes that were provided to critics. Here’s hoping that $120 million price tag doesn’t hang around the show’s neck forever.