The Get Down Is a Let Down: New at Reason

Television critic Glenn Garvin doesn’t know if music has really been going downhill ever since Buddy Holly died, but there certainly has been some wretched television made about it. Turn on your set this week if you don’t believe him.

Okay, “wretched” is too harsh a word for The Get Down, Netflix’s new series about the early days of hip-hop, on which a number of rap pioneers including Grandmaster Flash and Kurtis Blow consulted. But “bloated,” “derivative,” and “self-important” all seem fair, as does “scandalously overpriced.” If producer-director Baz Luhrmann really, as has been reported, spent $120 million and 10 years to develop this thing, Netflix’s accountants should be taken out and shot, and we don’t mean with a camera.

The premise of The Get Down—one of the various names the new music went by before “rap” and “hip-hop” stuck—Is interesting enough. Set in the 1977-79 time period when Manhattan was still in the glam grip of discos like Studio 54, it follows a bunch of black and Puerto Rican kids in the Bronx who are discovering the grittier attractions of tagging, break-dancing and rap—the various strands that will grow into hip-hop culture.

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