"You try too hard. You care too much. Disengage."

Now that the first season of Vinyl has drawn to a close, its strongest critique—and saving grace—came from the lips of its own accidental prophet.

In the sixth episode of the Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger-cosigned rock 'n' roll drama, Richie Finestra—the record man careening down a road to hell paved with good intentions, if that road happened to be Broadway—goes on a day-long bender, his worst yet. Previously on Vinyl, Finestra torched the last vestiges of the glittering life he had led as the boss at American Century Records. He sabotaged the sale of American Century, which would've set him and his family for life; he's been dropped by two of his biggest acts, Led Zeppelin and Hannibal, a fictional funk artist loosely based on Sly and the Family Stone, shortly following the blown deal. He's well underway with destroying his marriage with Devon, the Factory girl he met at a Velvet Underground show and with whom he ruled the city before decamping to Greenwich to start a family and lead a quiet, suburban existence. The fact that he's not only fallen off the wagon but run screaming in the opposite direction of it only exacerbates the mounting tension in both his personal and professional lives. And throughout all of this, he's got blood on his hands, as he threw punches—but not the fatal one; an associate took care of that for him with a blunt object—in a mob-entangled skirmish that wound up killing a surly radio promoter.

It's not this first death in Vinyl that yields the epiphany, but the first death—the one that took place years before on an unforgiving strip of Coney Island concrete—in Richie's story. In a flashback in the second episode, we're introduced to Ernst, a smart-ass German intellectual hanging around the Factory scene with Richie and Devon. He reemerges for Richie's mid-season meltdown, serving as the mischievous devil on his shoulder when the self-destructive dreamer could really use a voice of reason instead. After a fight with Devon that breaks them beyond repair, Richie, accompanied by Ernst, inhales more cocaine than oxygen; he roves through Manhattan, a one-man tornado fueled by jealousy, regret, blind ambition and Smirnoff as he roars through meetings, roughs up Andy Warhol and makes a scene at his business partner's daughter's bat mitzvah, all the while searching for the detour that'll lead him back to the road of redemption. Eventually, Richie and Ernst make it back to Greenwich, where Richie, exhausted, says he's done: done with the coke, done with the booze, done with the hustle, all of it. Ernst responds with the perfect, blunt truth: "You try too hard. You care too much. Disengage." A Shyamalanian twist follows when it's revealed that Richie's been talking to himself the whole time, that Ernst was killed years ago when he was hurled from the convertible Richie was driving one terrible night in Coney Island, but that doesn't lessen the gravity of his words. You try too hard. You care too much. Disengage.

Macall B. Polay/HBO

Ernst may as well have been looking directly into the camera, as that's been the secret to enjoying Vinyl all along. Before this excellent scene at the end of a strong episode, watching Vinyl felt like a chore, an act rooted in cultural obligation instead of enthusiasm. From its Valentine's Day premiere to last night's finale, Vinyl drew ire from critics and music fans by striving for gritty, ear-splitting authenticity and failing when it really didn't have an excuse to do so. Vinyl was created by Scorsese, Jagger, journalist Rich Cohen, and Terence Winter, the latter best known for his work as creator, producer, and writer of Boardwalk Empire. Based on the demonstrated expertise of all involved in their respective fields—Scorsese and Jagger's respective, triumphant half-centuries in film and rock; Winter and Cohen's domination of structure, suspense and strong dialogue on the page—the first season of Vinyl could've, and should've, been a flawlessly executed, thoroughly researched, and utterly grabbing epic set in one of the most colorful and exciting times in popular culture. Mick Jagger survived Altamont, for fuck's sake; whispering an anecdote or two into Winter's ear surely would've saved the script from mediocrity.

If Jagger did, in fact, share his hard-lived insight, it didn't show, and critics have been rightfully crying foul at the lack of effort that went into recreating the music scene of 1973 New York (Caryn Rose's painstaking fact-checking efforts in her reviews for Salon put the showrunners to shame; Richard Hell is the muse for one of Vinyl's key players, and he is not impressed), the dearth of originality in the plot (as our own Miles Raymer put it, the parallels between Vinyl and Mad Men run rampant, right down to the office dynamics and Richie/Don Draper comparisons) and the poorly cast portrayals of the world's most beloved rock icons, ranging from Zebedee Row's unforgivable Robert Plant impression to Noah Bean's passable Ziggy-era Bowie to Shawn Wayne Klush's sad-eyed, bloated, velour-coated Elvis.

The exceptional cast, lead by Bobby Cannavale's tortured Richie and Juno Temple as Jamie, Richie's firecracker of an A&R protege, was seemingly wasted on clichés (because of course Jamie had to fuck the lead singer of the band she was trying to sign) and glacially paced storylines with a few cringe-worthy rock star cameos thrown in to offer a sense of legitimacy, to remind you that, yes, Jagger's name is on this. (The casting of his son, James, as Kip—the smack-shooting lead singer of American Century's wonderband, the Nasty Bits—is surprisingly great.) It's hard to admire Ray Romano's near-perfect performance as Zak Yankovich, American Century's head of promotions, when he can't walk out of an interaction with Bowie with his dignity intact; the same goes for Jack Quaid, whose excellent portrayal of Clarke, a privileged Ivy League grad who's dumbfounded when he's forced to prove himself as an up-and-coming A&R rep, is overshadowed by distractingly forced bouts of shop-talk with a young Alice Cooper and no-name DJs. When a conversation between a bartender—who turns out to be CBGB's founder and proprietor, Hilly Kristal—and Richie results in the naming of the downtown rock haven in the finale, it's so groan-inducingly trite that you're offended on behalf of the establishment's memory. In short, Vinyl fell all over itself trying to make it look and sound right, to place its characters in the sightline of any person of interest that sneezed in a loud bar south of 14th Street in 1973. In doing so, it banked on the expected and watered down the rock 'n' roll in the process.

Patrick Harbron/HBO

But maybe this was the secret mission of Vinyl's first season all along, to cut down these idols for the sake of elevating Richie, Devon, and the trials and tribulations of American Century alongside them, for showing that the machine of the music industry is the sum of its parts. Truth is stranger than fiction, and Vinyl's best moments came when it stopped trying too hard. It disappointed when it came to portraying the inspiring, glamorous or exciting aspects of the music industry and the personalities it employs, but thrived in exposing the sinister mechanics of it in sensational, flame-fanning terms. It was thoroughly forensic in its tendency to unpack crushing disappointments wrought by hero worship and the debilitating pressures of standards and taste, as shown by Cannavale and Romano's chemistry as friends and business partners who "stay hungry" and rebound after each failure for the love of the music. It showed us just how easy it is to cross the brink of sanity when passion pushes you there; it's adept at decoding the language of the famous and the sacrifices it takes to learn how to speak it. Vinyl did all this in the second half of the season, but it did it in the moments stolen away on fire escapes with Jamie and Clarke, in elevators with Richie and Devon, in the bits where the industry and its creations didn't pull rank when things got a little too real in Richie's office with the door closed. It did this when the spotlight was trained on the rock star we know instead of the characters we don't just yet, when we find ourselves cheering for the Nasty Bits after they walk away from their first big gig rock stars, and we've seen everything Richie, Jamie and everyone they know had to go through in order for that to happen.

With that, Vinyl asked an awful lot of its viewers in its first season: It expected people to forgive its indiscretions and rock revisionism when they realized they were far more interested in the painfully human failings, and so wonderfully hard-earned triumphs, of its characters. It asked us to stop trying so hard when it came to connecting the dots between the facts and the drama unfolding onscreen. It asked us to disengage from what we've heard so that we can listen to something we haven't, to accept Richie's take on things instead of the truth we've come to know. Vinyl started looking up the second that Ernst told Richie that he was trying too hard. It seems like the rest of Vinyl's universe got the message, too, and that we've got more to look forward to than a goofy portrait of the Ramones and the CBGB bathroom.

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