“Vinyl” embraces a long-lost New York, but it has an air of leaden nostalgia. Illustration by Kristian Hammerstad

In 2004, in the Times, my colleague Kelefa Sanneh wrote a tart takedown of “rockism,” the fetishization of realness that haunts music criticism. “Rockism means idolizing the authentic old legend (or underground hero) while mocking the latest pop star,” he wrote. “Lionizing punk while barely tolerating disco; loving the live show and hating the music video; extolling the growling performer while hating the lip-syncher.” It’s the bias, in other words, that lets people sneer at Lady Gaga doing an homage to David Bowie, as if her alien act were self-evidently disposable while his was made to last.

As Sanneh noted, the problem with rockism isn’t loving Bruce Springsteen. The problem is that it makes rock itself (and jazz and punk and indie rock) seem cranky and pompous, not to mention defensive. That’s part of the trouble with HBO’s disappointing new drama “Vinyl,” a ballad of rockism cranked to eleven, created by Martin Scorsese, Mick Jagger, Rich Cohen, and Terence Winter, the showrunner of “Boardwalk Empire.” Set in a Dionysian seventies Manhattan, among suits, punks, and junkies, the series has a few satisfyingly silly set pieces, including a concert so ridiculously intense that the walls crumble. But it’s so bombastic on the topic of mind-blowing art that won’t sell out, man, that it grinds you down, as if you were standing way too close to some guy in a club who keeps screaming about how high he is.

Bobby Cannavale, a hairy life force of an actor who improves even misbegotten shows, plays Richie Finestra, who runs the symbolically named American Century, a once vital record label now teetering on the brink of irrelevance and insolvency. As he contemplates signing the company over to Polygram—whose executives are portrayed as venal krauts straight out of “Hogan’s Heroes”—Richie gets inspired by a punk act, the Nasty Bits. Soon, he’s back in business, browbeating his underlings to bring him the future of rock and roll: “Think back to the first time you heard a song that made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. Made you want to dance. Or fuck. Or go out and kick somebody’s ass!” Naturally, Richie is piggish and moody; he’s a cokehead who keeps relapsing. But, in the tired algorithm of cable drama, his failings are tragic, because he’s more sensitive than the goons and weasels who surround him. He’s a suit with the soul of a fan, a white guy capable of hearing an unknown African-American bluesman, Lester Grimes, and sensing raw brilliance that no one else gets.

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: “I had a golden ear, a silver tongue, and a pair of brass balls. But the problem became my nose and everything I put up it!” On cue, there’s an ugly murder scored to an ironic pop hit.

For all this baggage, “Vinyl” should still offer dirty kicks, based solely on its subject matter. Instead, it’s a preachy mess, cock-blocking any sign of fun. In one flashback, from the late sixties, Richie marvels, about the Velvet Underground, “They’re pure. Real. Not the least bit concerned with developing a mainstream following.” In another, from the fifties, Lester Grimes records vocals for “The Cha-Cha Twist.” As he croons, a teen-ager—the daughter of Richie’s mobster boss—wriggles her hips in shy joy. But, from the show’s perspective, her enthusiasm is actually a bad omen. Racist thugs will literally bludgeon Lester for refusing to make songs like that one: pop crap for girls, not blues for men.

The show improves slightly after the jankily paced pilot, but it never sheds its air of leaden nostalgia. Here and there, we get glimpses of seamy subcultures and a few lively performances, especially from the panther-like Olivia Wilde, as Richie’s wife, Devon, a former Warhol muse, and the amazing Juno Temple, as the aspiring A. & R. chick, Jamie, a drug-dealing Peggy Olson with her own golden ear and brass balls. A few episodes in, Daniel J. Watts makes an impression as Hannibal, a seductive funk singer. There are the requisite Scorsesian pyrotechnics, sometimes literally: a room catches fire and a man screams “Fuuuuck!” as the camera careens toward Janis Joplin howling “Cry Baby.” A housewife smashes a window with a frying pan. More often, though, the show takes bio-pic shortcuts. When famous faces appear, their intros are straight out of “Midnight in Paris”: “Alice Cooper, what are you doing here?”

“Vinyl,” in other words, is the Hard Rock Café: chaos for tourists. Still, if you squint, you can see what the creative team was going for—a deep dive into the muck of a long-lost Manhattan, all bets off, no safe places, no trigger warnings. For those who long for a pricklier age, the seventies have become something like an escapist fantasyland, and, honestly, I can see the appeal. When I watched “Argo,” I got obsessed with how fun it looked to be a nineteen-seventies white guy. Tight avocado pants! Before AIDS, after the sexual revolution. Women in charge of the hors d’oeuvres, smoking in the office, and a strong mustache game. It makes sense that TV-makers have begun to explore this material, with the excellent second season of “Fargo” and new projects due from Baz Luhrmann (South Bronx, disco, black and Latino) and David Simon (Times Square, porn, James Franco playing twins). Fingers crossed that a Lydia Lunch bio-pic starring Kristen Stewart is on the way. It’ll be a relief to see shows use different lenses, in less corny genres, to capture those fading memories. After all, as Hanson once put it, “In an mmmbop, they’re gone.”

“Billions” is another big, dirty melodrama about a moneyed Manhattan antihero, in this case the hedge-fund billionaire Bobby (Axe) Axelrod, played by Damian Lewis. Like “Vinyl,” the show can be coarse. It’s got plentiful Showtime-brand kink (Dominatrix wife? Secretly filmed lesbian sex? Anal revenge fantasies? Check, check, check!), plus maybe one too many scenes in which people threaten to ream one another. But, while I found “Vinyl” to be a slog, I can’t stop watching “Billions,” which, under its lurid surface, is smartly paced and frank—even thoughtful—about the disconcerting fantasies it provokes.

The central drama is a cat-and-mouse game between Paul Giamatti’s fuming U.S. Attorney, Chuck Rhoades, who is dying to become governor, and the slippery Axe, a financial titan who has reinvented himself, post-9/11, as a New York philanthropic luminary, with his shady market manipulations always just out of view. In a totally ridiculous but effective twist, Rhoades’s wife, Wendy (Maggie Siff), works for Axe as the hedge fund’s house shrink, a job more ethically dicey than that of any bond trader. In essence, she’s a life coach whose mandate is to keep the sharks biting. An expert on power exchange (she happens to be that dominatrix), she’s got secrets of her own, including the fact that she appears to be more drawn to her winner boss than to the twitchy Javert with whom she’s built a family.