SERIES PREMIERE: Damien Chazelle, the Oscar-winning
La La Land director, once again presents a story built around a love of music and, yes, another jazz club. But
The Eddy, an eight-episode drama series presented today by Netflix, is vastly different.
La La Land was a movie musical, giddy in its occasional flights of fancy amid the more grounded love story it was telling.
The Eddy is reality-based in its love of music and the local community flavor, more like HBO’s
Treme. Except
The Eddy, the name of both a jazz club and its resident band, isn’t set in Los Angeles or in New Orleans. It’s set in Paris, where the main character, a semi-retired jazz musician named Elliot (played by Andre Holland), has left America to set up a new life – kind of a modern-day Sidney Bechet, except while Elliot continues to compose music, while co-running a jazz club, he no longer performs it. But music runs deep in this series anyway, and it helps that the actors playing the band known as The Eddy are actual musicians. When they play, like Paul Simon’s cohorts in the film
One-Trick Pony, you can indeed, as the song says, feel the heat of their heart come rising through. Joanna Kulig, as the lead singer Maja, is quite good, too. There are multiple languages heard in
The Eddy, so prepare for some subtitles. But stay for the jazz, and for the flair: Chazelle directs the first two episodes, and there are enough subplots to interest those for whom music itself isn’t enough of a draw.
For a full review, see David Hinckley's All Along the Watchtower.