What is to be done with Vinyl?

That is the question on no one’s trembling lips, and yet it must be asked and, if possible, answered . . . preferably by a trained technician and weather-chapped veteran of the Seventies such as myself.

Vinyl, whose debut season finale will be shown on HBO this Sunday, isn’t one of those quirky, sensibly priced, indie-ish character studies the network lets trot around the track for a season or two in the hopes that it’ll develop a following that’ll fanaticize into a cult and fill a dependable spot in the schedule. Although a number of those shows have whiffed out in recent years (Enlightened, Looking, and the recently concluded Togetherness eked out two seasons, while Christopher Guest’s Family Tree only notched one), HBO was able to take it in stride because they didn’t have major money and expectations riding on them.

With Vinyl, as with the ill-begotten Luck, it does.

Created by the four horsemen of the apocalypse—Mick Jagger, Martin Scorsese, Rich Cohen, and Terence Winter—Vinyl is the Boogie Nights of the record biz, a sprawling, brawling, roller-coaster recreation of the music scene in Seventies New York, when garbage fires gave the East Village rubble a piquant glow and no one strayed into the park at night for fear of being hunted like wild boar. Cheap rents, outcast talent, and a healthy dash of fuck-all abandon helped produce a ragtag creative renaissance (especially downtown) that requires a Hogarthian canvas to cram it all in. But cramming isn’t conducive to dramatic clarity and distinct characterization, as Vinyl’s two hour premiere, directed by Scorsese with a furious conductor’s baton, demonstrated with a hearty din. Where the flowing camera in Boogie Nights introduced us to its major players on the smooth fly, Vinyl chucked its principals and now-gone landmarks at us with concussive force, literally bringing down the ceiling at the climax (a Biblical rendering of the collapse of the Mercer Arts Center) and burying its chief protagonist—rumbustious record exec Richie Finestra (Bobby Cannavale)—in debris, from which he emerges, as if resurrected from the ashen dead. Yet another item to add to future thesis papers on the Catholic agon of Martin Scorsese.

There was the hope that after heaving so much at the viewer in the two-hour premiere (unconfirmed reports had its price tag at $30 million, which is a lot of peanut shells for TV), Vinyl would settle down, iron out the rough spots, get its backfield in motion, and follow its guidance system. Its guidance system might as well have been a roulette wheel. The series rattled all over the place, a well-observed, executed scene elbowed aside by a bout of bombast, a penny arcade of pulp melodrama punctuated by Richie Finestra’s paroxysms of cursing, threatening, object-hurling coke addict tantrums.

The ratings weren’t gangbuster from the start and didn’t gain the traction necessary to justify such a costly investment in money, talent, and Spandex. Before the season finale, news broke that Winter (whose gold-trimmed resume includes The Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire, and The Wolf of Wall Street) would be leaving as showrunner, an unambiguous sign that HBO knew that changes had to be made to right Vinyl’s wayward course and steer it away from the elephant’s graveyard.

But what changes? Although the practice of constructive criticism is novel to me after so many years hippity-hoppiting down Fury Road, I have a few suggestions that, fully implemented, might spare Vinyl from suffering the dreaded second-season HBO lop-off.