While they’ve inspired such enjoyable exaggerations as FX’s “Devs” and Apple’s “Mythic Quest,” the inner workings of the real-life tech space have largely been deemed off-limits by producers. A heightened threat of litigation is doubtless one reason; equally, round-the-clock coding rarely makes for the most compelling spectator sport, however pounding the electronica you set it to. Plus, David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin’s 2010 feature “The Social Network,” on the turbulent genesis of Facebook, set the bar stratospherically high.
“Wallander” producers Yellow Bird believe they’ve sourced a comparably gripping tale in “The Playlist,” a six-part Netflix miniseries centring on Swedish success story Spotify, the streaming platform that revolutionized music listening while causing understandable conniptions in Neil Young. Dramatizing competing narratives from the pages of Sven Carlsson and Jonas Leijonhufvud’s non-fiction compendium “Spotify Untold,” the show posits that, with this app, much depends on who you’re listening to – even if it all begins to sound highly authorized after a while.
We get the backstory in opening instalment “The Vision,” which introduces us to Spotify founder Daniel Ek as he was in 2004. Pale, balding and socially awkward, this Ek (Edvin Endre) is a neurotic outsider from a lowly background who remembers record-store hipsters sneering when he used coins to buy an Aretha Franklin CD for his beloved mother. As his voiceover puts it, demonstrating a not atypical lack of irony and self-awareness: “No one should have power over music in that way.”
Like “The Social Network’s” Mark Zuckerberg, the show’s Ek is driven by rejection – though here it’s not by a girl, but by Google, driving him to target the billion-dollar middle ground between pre-existing corporate control and The Pirate Bay’s torrent-led new order. On one hand, he’s solving an urgent problem – how to drag the music industry into the digital age – but his hastily executed fix has unanticipated consequences. These are detailed over the course of subsequent episodes, which shuffle between story streams in a way that seems broadly analogous to the platform’s own MO.
Episode two dramatizes the industry reaction, introducing music exec Per Sundin (Ulf Stenberg), a man trying to protect what’s left of an ever-dwindling pie, instantly characterized by his living-room jukebox. Later episodes send in the lawyers and moneymen; plus, malcontent coder Andreas Ehn (Joel Lützow), installing algorithms to gain a control he can’t obtain over girls in an episode that’s as close as “The Playlist” gets to “The Social Network”; and finally musician and single mother Bobbi T (Janice Kamya Kavander), through whom the show can address some of the pushback.
Superficially, it all shapes up as a classy, adult 21st century streaming option: scrupulously even-handed, it scatters its research over functional mini-arcs in which everybody learns collaboration is better than continually butting heads. Visually, it’s been conceived as a lookbook of recent trends in hotdesking and hub design; and the soundtrack is inevitably rich in resources, from Amerie’s “Gotta Work” to the arguably lesser achievement of the Hallelujah Chorus. (Norwegian director Per-Olav Sørensen is also bound by Swedish law to fire up some Ace of Base.)
What it lacks – and this becomes palpable as the series progresses – is anything like the electric thrill of the Fincher film. “The Playlist” falls squarely into the category of executive-level drama, another of those recent programming choices the suits were surely quick to greenlight on the basis that they connected with the corporate politics in play. The final two episodes start to mine the complex interpersonal conflict Sorkin and Fincher ran with, but until then, it’s mostly a matter of paperwork; though these negotiations have been simplified for a Netflix audience, the first half may only hook viewers trained in copyright law.
In retrospect, even the narrative baton-passing seems chiefly to reflect the signatures of the many interested parties who were obliged to sign off on the finished product. As it is, we’re given 40-minute windows – the span of the average meeting – with composite-like figures who forever seem more important for the positions they occupy than for who they are as people. It’s carefully brokered dealmaking, in that nothing here should trouble Spotify’s actual lawyers, but there’s never anything on screen that’s as exciting as, say, finding a playlist tailored to your specific party-going needs.
Only twice is music itself elevated to a narrative level: once, when the penniless Ek pirates a Gavin DeGraw track to drown out a noisy neighbor, and at the last, when Bobbi T’s keening track “Tomorrow Is My Turn” speaks to wider feelings of going unheard. Too often in “The Playlist,” music takes a backseat to the management of music: how music gets cleaned up, tidied away, repackaged and remonetized. That’s a 21st century concern, too, of course, but it makes for a show that feels like opening up Spotify to stream a Coldplay album: Admire the production all you want, but it’s still too mid-tempo to properly quicken the pulse.
“The Playlist” is now streaming on Netflix. Six episodes in total; all six were screened for review.
Production:
Development Producer: Luke Franklin. Line Producers: Pierre Stein Bonnet, Igor Nola, Peter Onsmark Producer: Eiffel Mattsson
Cast: Edvin Endre, Gizem Erdogan, Christian Hillborg, Ulf Stenberg, Joel Lutzow, Janice Kamya Kavander
From Variety US