All beat, no heart

BAZ LUHRMANN, the director of “The Great Gatsby” and “Moulin Rouge”, is known for stylistic rambunctiousness, not artistic reserve. So Netflix executives should not have been too surprised when the Australian auteur reportedly overshot the budget of his first television series, “The Get Down”, by $30m. At a cost of $120m, the show is among the most expensive ever made in an industry engaged in an apparently limitless game of creative one-upmanship.

Set in the Bronx in the late 1970s, “The Get Down” does not brush over the borough’s history of poverty, crime and urban neglect. On a tour as a presidential candidate in 1980, Ronald Reagan compared it to London during the Blitz, and archive footage woven into the show affords a glimpse of this bleak milieu. The first six episodes, available on Netflix, take place in the scorching summer of 1977. (The remaining episodes will be released next year.) In the stifling heat, chaos feels close. Fires rip through abandoned tenements. One character asks, “Yo, is it just me today, or is it like the Bronx is getting closer to the sun?”

Rather than dwell on blight, though, “The Get Down” celebrates the tenacity and vim of the area’s black and Latino youth. It chronicles the generation who revolutionised music by breaking from disco to invent hip-hop. For the protagonists, DJing, graffiti, breakdancing and rapping offer an escape from drug-pushing and gang war. “Had to find my rope/To pull me up/Because I needed some kind of hope/To fill me up,” raps the narrator in the prologue. Mr Luhrmann’s stamp is felt in the show’s glossy, hyper-real shots saturated with colour, and his freewheeling camera-work has found a perfect subject in the disco dance-floor.

There was a time when film directors would not touch television shows. Writers and producers were deemed to wield too much power. The picture is different in today’s much-praised age of television, where producers court big names with the promise of increased creative control. Mr Luhrmann, who initially saw “The Get Down” as a film, was persuaded to oversee the series from start to finish by Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s chief content officer, according to Variety, an entertainment-industry magazine.

Mr Luhrmann spared no expense or detail in realising his vision. A pioneering rapper, Grandmaster Flash (also a character), and Nelson George, a journalist covering African-American culture in the 1970s, were consultants, and the cast were taught on set to breakdance and mix on turntables as they did in the 1970s. Nas, a hip-hop artist and producer, scored original music; he has sold more than 25m records and probably did not come cheap.

It is not clear that the investment has paid off. The creative direction is muddled: Mr Luhrmann directed only the first episode, but worked closely on them all, resulting in an uneven quality. Stuffed with characters, subplots and flashy song-and-dance numbers, the show resembles a musical. That works fine for the big screen. But television gives time for characters to grow and plots to unspool, keeping viewers coming back. As a director, Mr Luhrmann is more interested in melodrama and spectacle than drawing the audience in. “The Get Down”, like a disco ball, glitters on the outside, but is hollow at its heart.