Spoiler alert: this recap assumes you’ve seen episode six of Vinyl on HBO or Sky Atlantic. Don’t read on if you haven’t.
‘Does surrounding yourself with idiots make you feel superior? How will you break new ground if this is who executes your vision?’
It probably stands to reason that imaginary friends always get the best lines. Last year Christian Slater owned pretty much everybody else on television in Mr Robot, and here, Richie Finestra’s hallucination of dead partner-in-crime Ernst steals the whole series so far. For sure, a character so acerbically hilarious could probably never exist, but it’s palpable just how much fun the writers have had in bringing him to “life”.
Certainly it’s a neat device to illustrate what a nightmare Richie has descended into: as good as he is, another hour of a sweaty Bobby Cannavale charging round shouting at people would be tiresome. This way we get the same, but with an enigmatic German on his shoulder speaking his most unpleasant thoughts.
With Devon gone and the cops seemingly closing in, Richie returns to work and sets about trashing everything around him. The realisation that Ernst isn’t real and Richie’s doing all this stuff alone makes it all the more brutal; slurring in front of his kids, bailing on a meeting for a doomed hook-up with the secretary, making a scene outside Max’s Kansas City in front of Andy Warhol, bullying his artists, achieving little more each day than glugging and snorting. And nobody (well almost nobody) is doing anything to stop him.
What’s also better this week is that Richie’s antics are leading somewhere; there’s more movement to the plot and depth to the relationships. Holed up in the Chelsea Hotel with Ingrid (Birgitte Hjort Sørensen, showing some real warmth in a show that tends to lack it), Devon makes heavy weather of her lot in life (“Day after day in that house, I hear this creaking back and forth. It’s the sound of me hanging myself from the rafters.”)
But her friend counsels that Richie is a good man, revealing of her own husband, “Ernst could be so merciless. Richie softened him.” Encouraged by memories of happier times, Devon does resolve to try again, returning home, only for Richie’s bungled apology to reveal that he’s so out of it he thinks he’s been hanging out with Ernst. With Devon furtively taking the kids and fleeing, Richie is schooled in what rock bottom feels like, and the sting comes via flashback. Ernst was killed in a car accident in Coney Island with a wasted Richie at the wheel. No wonder all the talk of hot dogs was playing on his mind.
‘I can’t be the first person to say it to your face – the logo looks like a toilet’
Out of all the relationships, Richie sets fire to this week, perhaps the most compelling is that with Zak, as Ray Romano finally gets to do some proper acting. Turning up six hours late and high as a kite for Zak’s daughter’s Bat Mitzvah, Richie still finds a way to make it all about him, playing unwelcome camaraderie to his “brother” with his grand vision for Alibi Records, and Zack just flips. It’s a powerful scene, set amid a swanky ceremony that this near-bankrupt man can ill afford. For a show so steeped in excess, it’s effective to witness the boring, domestic consequences of Richie’s selfishness. It feels well-earned when Zak snaps, punches Richie out with a despairing cry of “I’m a record man!” We also see more of Zack’s predicament than ever – an old-schooler without Richie’s instinct in a changing world that he cannot understand. Like most of the staff, he’s blindsided by Andrea’s forward-facing vision for the company. All those records sold and not one of the staff realised their logo looked like a toilet.
Vinyl’s at its strongest when it makes the most of its setting, weaker when doing the generic anti-hero stuff and little else. This episode, Cyclone, made the most of both.
Fact and fiction
There must have been high-up meetings at HBO about the David Bowie cameo. Filming completed months ago, and you could make a case that it would have been disrespectful to cut that sequence. But for me, the sight of Noah Bean goofing up the show’s standard impersonation-of-a-rock-star thing felt a bit awkwardly too soon.
Incidentally, Todd Haynes’ 1998 glam-rock tribute Velvet Goldmine came about because Bowie refused the director permission to make a straightforward biopic, leading the director to make the far more interesting fantasy retelling of his story.
Meanwhile, the photographer Devon poses nude for in an attempt to rediscover her artistic calling was based on George Segal.
Sound and vision
Speaking of Bowie, the version of Life On Mars? performed at the Bat Mitzvah was recorded by Trey Songz – although it doesn’t appear on this week’s soundtrack EP.
Perhaps more intriguingly, the version of Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl) also performed at the Bat Mitzvah was the work of Tunde Adepimbe from TV On the Radio.
Sleeve notes
Aside from Ingrid and Devon’s heart-to-heart, there was another all-too-rare moment of warmth this week, as Kip recruits a new guitarist for the Nasty Bits in the most unusual of ways, joining in and chasing him as he steals a guitar from a music shop. You take your cute pickings where you can in this show.
For all his bad behaviour, Richie has a point when he unpicks the logic of Dionne Warwick’s One Less Bell To Answer. “What is he, a fuckin’ midget?”
Devon and Nico once recorded a song together, but it sounded like a cow giving birth.
No Detective Lenk this week, but I can live with that to maximise screen time for Ernst.
