Rock ’n’ roll movies are surprisingly few and far between, given our obsession with the lifestyles, excesses, inspirations, and potentially galvanizing and mass-connective musical power of the culture. For the latest addition to the slender genre, head to the living room for a voyeuristic visit to an all-important behind-the-scene: Roadies, a new Showtime series, teased curiosity seekers online and now makes its actual television premiere on Sunday, June 26.
Who better to bring us backstage, on the small or big screen, than Cameron Crowe, who wrote and directed the pilot for the 10-episode series? Crowe, almost famous as a boy wonder rock journalist for Rolling Stone in the ’70s, moved into film with varying success, first following up and looking back on his own rock-lined past in the 2000 film Almost Famous, and dipped into the rock doc biz with Pearl Jam 20 in 2011. Along the way, Crowe also developed a reputation for creating weirdly awkward (and, oddly, perversely enjoyable) lemons, such as Elizabethtown and Aloha.
With TV’s Roadies, we are offered a fresh, if hardly realistic spin on the world of rock ’n’ roll mythology in which the actual rock stars in the mix are mostly left out of the narrative picture except as vaporous Godheads. Working his dramatic designs within this work force ensemble — from management to stage setters, equipment luggers to fixers — Crowe’s bad-boy, feel-good touch may have found a new medium for which he’s suited. He seems more than comfortable in this setting and mobile microcosm, creating an ensemble piece which wavers between the easy banter and trivial conflicts of traditional television drama and the more probing communal overview and human tragicomedy of Robert Altman’s Nashville — but more the former than the latter.