Brow Beat

The Trailer for Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger’s Show About Rock in ’70s NYC Is So Scorsese

Bobby Cannavale in the trailer for Vinyl
Wait—is it literally snowing cocaine?

Still of Bobby Cannavale in the trailer for Vinyl

Next year, in the wake of the phenomenal success of the music industry show Empire, HBO and Netflix are set to go head-to-head with their own music industry shows, both set in 1970s New York City. From Netflix we’ll get The Get Down, Baz Luhrmann’s musical series that will show the rise of punk, disco, and hip-hop at CBGB’s, Studio 54, and the block parties of the Bronx. And from HBO we’ll get Vinyl, Terrence Winter’s drama about the rock ’n’ roll scene, which also has Mick Jagger as an executive producer and Martin Scorsese as the director for the pilot.

Scorsese and Winter’s last project together was the brilliant and controversial The Wolf of Wall Street, and they hit a lot of the same notes in the first teaser trailer: There’s cocaine use, freeze frames, whip zooms, stacks of money, more cocaine use, first-person voice-over, and—since it has Scorsese behind the camera—it all culminates in brutal beatings set to rock music.

It’s nice to see the great Bobby Cannavale finally starring in his own project, and Scorsese’s movies tend to really hum when they get going on the subject of cocaine. (The director had his own struggles with the drug in the ’70s.) On the other hand, Boardwalk Empire, the other Terrence Winter show for which Scorsese directed the pilot, lost a lot of viewers over the years. We’ll see whether Vinyl is more Wolf of Wall Street or Boardwalk Empire—and whether HBO or Netflix will win this battle of the NYC shows—when Vinyl comes out next year.