The Get Down

Netflix, streaming now

It’s possible that, after watching the first six episodes of The Get Down (the epic Baz Luhrmann series finally arrived on Netflix last Friday), you’ll start to wonder just how huge and ambitious this premium TV lark can get. This feels like such a humongous endeavour – not so much a TV series as a sprawling six-and-a-half hour visual novel, full of dozens of characters, ideas, story threads and themes – that it’s a miracle it actually made it to air at all. Indeed, the mere fact we’re only getting the first half of the series now (there will be six more episodes next year) is some indication of how difficult it’s been to wrangle this vast enterprise into some kind of indentifiable TV show. It’s all about the birth of rap and hip-hop in late ’70s New York, focusing on a group of talented young creative types in a rundown area of the Bronx. If you’ve seen Luhrmann’s invariably OTT movies, from the triumphs of Romeo + Juliet and Moulin Rouge to the rather more flawed Australia, you’ll know he likes everything to be as extravagant as possible. The Get Down looks as incredible as you’d hope, somehow showing us the grittiness of its core characters’ deprived environment while also being as campy and flamboyant as Baz can get. But at the heart of the whole grandiose mess is an affecting star-crossed lovers-style teen romance between beautiful singer Mylene (Herizen Guardiola) and smart would-be poet/musician Zeke (Justice Smith), although Jaden Smith steals the whole thing as a graffiti obsessive. It’s exhausting, confusing, pretentious, but also funny and, in the end, I loved it. Stick with it and I think you will, too.