Here at Must TV Towers (in fact a WFH bungalow), we love a good trailer, but we can’t pretend we like the trailer for Netflix’s new Paris-set blockbuster The Eddy. Unlike many shows where the trailer is the best bit, in this instance the opposite is true, and this Jazz-themed drama from Damien “La La Land” Chazelle is a foot-tapping winner.
Ed Potton in The Times clocks The Eddy as “conspicuously cool, with its stylishly high-achieving cast and crew, its Grammy-winning musicians and its fashionably distressed handheld camerawork.” He also loves the tunes: “They sound great, and I don’t even like jazz very much… So, a jazz musical for people who don’t like jazz or musicals. Which is probably quite a chunk of the population.”
In the Los Angeles Times Robert Lloyd feels it “is an unusual mix of the very good and the less good… There are things here I am happy to have seen — thankful, even — as anything that’s come my way across a screen, that I could watch a hundred times and feel their impact no less. At other times, it is as if a team of thoroughbreds has been yoked to a bus filled with concrete and plot.”
In The Guardian, Lucy Mangan notes that this is a grittier side of Paris from the one we know on our tourist jaunts, and it’s the music that sings in this show: “performance and rehearsal scenes dominate; they are filmed at such length and in such loving detail that it is obvious where the creator’s heart and interest lies. Chazelle may only have directed the first two episodes, but he sets the tone… And the sessions are brilliant. But they don’t serve the slow, slight plot”.
So the reviews are not entirely positive, but we enjoyed The Eddy. However, we also like a night in a dodgy jazz club, and thought La La Land was actually quite a charming movie, so it may be that we’re easily won over by a slow, seedy night of music in the rougher parts of Paris…
The Eddy first shown May 2020. You can watch the trailer by pressing play on the show image, or by clicking here.
