Amazon’s ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ Tops Music And TV Charts

Within its first 24 hours, Daisy Jones & The Six topped television and music charts.

Within hours of their respective releases, the series hit No. 1 on Amazon Prime Video’s Top 10 list in the U.S., and the show’s coinciding debut album Aurora made it to No. 1 in the U.S. on iTunes. The album’s vinyl version also nabbed the No. 1 slot on Amazon. Daisy Jones & The Six is the first fictional band to hit No. 1 (more than once).

The series is technically about a fictional band based on the New York Times bestselling novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid – which just climbed to No. 1 on Amazon’s bestsellers list – but this group of actors morphed into a real band during filming. They went to “Band Camp,” and stars-slash-lead-singers Riley Keough and Sam Claflin took their first singing lesson together.

The story follows this band fronted by two feuding yet charismatic lead singers, Daisy Jones (Keough) and Billy Dunne (Claflin). Their voices blend beautifully, but their chemistry isn’t only on stage, complicating matters for the entire band.

The drama unfolds over the soundtrack of the band’s fantastic music. There are 11 original songs on the Aurora album, produced by Blake Mills, with additional production by Tony Berg.

There are certainly parallels between Fleetwood Mac and the heated relationship between Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham. Those behind the series say the duo is included in the amalgamation of influences. The story, however, is not based on them.

How Reid’s book initially landed at Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine is also an interesting tale. It was mid-2017 when husband and wife duo Scott and Lauren Neustadter discovered the book pre-publication and sans publisher. In separate interviews, the couple explained how it all unfolded.

Lauren had recently started at Hello Sunshine as the President of Film & Television. She began in May, and Reid’s book landed in Scott’s hands in July. She’d already brought in Celeste Ng’s Little Fires Everywhere, which would become a limited series for the company.

Scott received an early draft of the manuscript from Reid’s manager, Brad Mendelsohn. “Everyone who knows me knows I’m a bit of a music nerd,” he said. “After reading maybe 100 pages, I was all in. And I did something I probably wasn’t supposed to: I texted my wife, Lauren, who had just been hired to run film and television for Reese’s new company. Usually, Lauren gets the hot new material way before I do, but in this case, she hadn’t heard of it yet, and I said, ‘You have to read this right away because you’re going to lose your minds.’ And I was right.”

“Scott knew Reese would flip out over it,” Lauren recalled. “He told me I had to go through the proper channels to get it.”

She picked up the phone and called Mendelsohn to ask if he would officially share the book with Hello Sunshine. Immediately upon getting the book, she and the team, including Witherspoon, read and loved it. They knew they had struck gold.

“I was completely engrossed,” she said. “I knew it would be unbelievably competitive, and we’d have to go after it with everything we’ve got. I woke up to an email from Reese saying how much she loved it and was ready to go all in.”

It became a bit of a family affair. Scott co-created the series with Michael H. Weber, and the two wrote the pilot episode. Scott executive produced and served as co-showrunner alongside Will Graham, who also served as an executive producer. Lauren became an executive producer alongside Witherspoon for Hello Sunshine and Mendelsohn for Circle of Confusion.

“I enjoy writing about complicated relationships and love stories where the people themselves are the obstacles to their happiness,” said Scott when asked what drew him into the world Reid created. “If you can sprinkle in a little pop music, even better.”

He then reflected on a lunch meeting he had with Witherspoon years earlier. “She asked me what my dream project would be. I told her I’d like to do something about Fleetwood Mac making the Rumours album. Well, good luck getting the rights to that story! But Taylor’s book is even better. While it starts from that premise of talented artists going through immense relationship turmoil and putting it all into the art they create, it builds it out in all sorts of exciting directions that the true story never could. Plus, we would get to write our version of a classic 1970s pop album, a dream come true for someone like me.”

Though the cast and crew became family and had a lot of fun throughout the process, Lauren described the many challenges they faced: it’s a period piece with an original music soundtrack, which would, under normal circumstances, take three years to complete. Throw a pandemic into the mix, and six years passed between inception and completion.

“Covid presented a huge number of challenges. It also allowed us to slow down and take this magnificent group of actors and turn them into a real band,” she explained. “To their great credit, they made the most of the time and honed their craft as actors and musicians, and they became Daisy Jones & The Six. It feels like we’ve done something pretty groundbreaking here.”

Scott agreed. “We always said the bar was high, and the bullseye was tiny, but we couldn’t be happier with the result.” When asked if there could be a second season, he said they saw it as a limited series with a definitive beginning, middle, and end. “That said, I’ve always believed that the best endings are those that answer all your questions but then ask some new ones. So, we’ll see.”

Camila Morrone, Will Harrison, Suki Waterhouse, Josh Whitehouse, Sebastian Chacon, Nabiyah Be, Tom Wright, and Timothy Olyphant star alongside Keough and Claflin with James Ponsoldt, Nzingha Stewart, and Will Graham directing.

The 10-episode Amazon series premiered on March 3 with three episodes. Three new episodes will drop next week, with two each week leading to the finale on March 24.