First of all, you’re not going to catch me bad-mouthing “Mozart in the Jungle,” the new series on Amazon Prime. A television series . . . with major stars . . . about classical musicians? What is this, 1946, the year that the suave romantic thriller “Deception” (in which Bette Davis plays the murderous wife of a famous cellist) was hitting theatres? Or 1937, when the sounds of Beethoven, Toscanini, and the NBC Symphony were coming out of the big talking box in the front parlor, and Deanna Durbin, Leopold Stokowski, and a scrum of unemployed musicians were getting through the Great Depression together in the movie “100 Men and a Girl”?

The ridiculous yet endearing scene in which an annoyed Stokowski, playing himself, is so utterly captivated by the musicians’ impromptu performance of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody in D Minor that he cannot help but start conducting them himself is a gem of a refined cinematic genre: classixploitation. (Ten points if you can spot Adolphe Menjou.) Sure, classical references still exist in popular culture, but when they’re not lamely trying to puncture “snobbery” they’re likely to attach themselves to “weighty themes”—as in the recent films “A Late Quartet,” in which the members of a string quartet adapt to their cellist’s diagnosis of Parkinson’s, or “The Soloist,” in which Jamie Foxx portrays a homeless, schizophrenic violinist. Classical music, increasingly starved of money, relies on moral authority as a leading asset. But some of us surely miss the insouciant glamour of such films as the George Cukor melodrama “A Woman’s Face” (1941), in which a scheming Conrad Veidt asks Joan Crawford what kind of music she likes. The immortal reply: “Some symphonies, most concertos.” (Twenty points if you can unpack that.)

Well, those happy days are back, at least for a while, with “Mozart in the Jungle.” The “board chairperson” of the fictional New York Symphony (Bernadette Peters, as slyly winning as ever) is bringing in a young, exciting new Latin American maestro (an intensely focussed Gael García Bernal) while easing the orchestra’s eminence grise (Malcolm McDowell, still up for some crazy fun) into a conductor-emeritus position, all at a time of impending financial crisis. The musicians toiling onstage include a beautiful middle-aged cellist (Saffron Burrows), having an intermittent affair with the conductor, and a bitter taskmaster of a principal oboist (Debra Monk) who reluctantly becomes the teacher of a younger aspirant, Hailey (a sympathetic Lola Kirke), who gets her big break with the symphony in a rehearsal but blows her chance. (She goes on to become the new conductor’s personal assistant.)

The personal and professional tribulations of Hailey, the young oboist, are the central concerns of the show, but all the characters, young and old, musical or not, are effectively caught up in the sweep of the narrative: as with any orchestra and its staff, they’re all in this together. (Emily Nussbaum, our television critic, offers a full review here.)

The series—occasionally silly, often smart—is based on Blair Tindall’s eponymous book, a 2005 exposé of the sometimes seamy underside of the New York classical-music scene. Tindall mixed dry statistical reports of the industry’s decline with the story of her own story professional ups and downs as an oboist, one that involved sex-for-gigs arrangements and personal embarrassments, along with many of the realizations, epiphanies, and revelations typical of the self-help genre. It was easy for some of us to laugh at it. And yet, along with the more scholarly books by the muckraking writer and broadcaster Norman Lebrecht (such as “The Maestro Myth”), “Mozart in the Jungle” came out and said what a lot of us couldn’t yet admit: that change was coming to classical music, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.

The pervasive drug use depicted in the series—the orchestra’s timpanist doubles as its official dealer in all controlled substances—seems an anachronism of the book’s nineteen-eighties setting. As a party scene between two young musicians, who play a drinking game while trying to outdo each other in the expert performance of orchestral excerpts, accurately attests, classical musicians are no slouches when it comes to the downing of grape and grain. But in my personal experience of the current New York music world, I’ve never encountered a serious drug user. That party is set in Brooklyn, not in Tindall’s world of the not-yet-stroller-clogged Upper West Side.

But there is much else in the action and details that, coming from the writers, has an admirably contemporary ambience. García Bernal’s impassioned Rodrigo is a nod to a real-life phenomenon, the L.A. Phil’s music director Gustavo Dudamel; Rodrigo’s previous appointment at the “Oslo Symphony” is not only an echo of Dudamel’s tenure at Sweden’s Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra but hints at another young music director, the New York Philharmonic’s Alan Gilbert, who was previously the conductor of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic. The orchestra’s specific discussions of labor issues—such as management’s desire to reduce the salaries of young, new hires—could have been taken from the recent disputes involving the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

It’s fun to see Bernadette Peters running the Symphony, but it’s singularly odd that a socialite board chair would take on the duties normally allotted to an organization’s executive director, which her orchestra seems to lack. (Or maybe not so odd, if Ronald Perelman, whom the Times described as having “something of a reputation for combativeness,” takes on an outsized role at Carnegie Hall.) Orchestras have struggled financially for decades, but Peters’s lunchtime encounter with Edward, a ball-busting Wall Street type who’s out to get Rodrigo, has the ring of today’s Fox News philosophy. “Classical music has been losing money for people for five hundred years,” she says. “It’s not a business.” To which the scowling Edward replies, “Everything’s a business.”

Reading James B. Stewart’s piece about Peter Gelb and the financial fracas at the Metropolitan Opera, I was cheered to see the private-equity executive William C. Morris, the chairman of the company’s executive committee, declare that opera is, indeed, “not a business.” Neither are symphony orchestras: it’s simply a question of whether society finds it worthwhile to pay for them. “Mozart in the Jungle” has its share of absurd moments, including several attempts at magical realism that threaten to verge out of control. But if the show primes the classical pump for an affluent younger generation, it’s more than good enough for me. Amazon has just renewed it for a second season.

_Disclosure: The New Yorker's docu-series "The New Yorker Presents" also appears on Amazon. _