By Alexis Nedd
A man, a jazz club, a murder, and the music. With all of these elements, Netflix’s The Eddy on Netflix sounds like something Netflix audiences of taste should devour. But the whole of the show does not live up to the sum of its parts.
Instead, The Eddy’s music-infused story comes off as an attempt to recreate the free and emotional nature of jazz music in the format of a television show. The good news is that it does succeed in capturing jazz’s improvisational spirit. The bad news is that it does so at the expense of its plot.
Each of the main players in The Eddy acts as an instrument in a musical ensemble, with almost every episode focusing on how one character’s personal experience informs their place in the music of the main story.
We get it, The Eddy. The jazzy music is demonstrating the characters’ jazzy feelings.
Many of their stories are fascinating and well acted, particularly in the episodes that focus on Jude the bassist (Damian Nueva) and Amira (Leïla Bekhti, a series standout). The issue arises when the show tries to blend its characters’ individual melodies into the A plot, which winds up feeling cacophonous or inconsequential depending on the episode.
It doesn’t help that the main storyline, which revolves around club owner Elliot (André Holland) reeling from the effects of a friend’s murder while his objectively horrible daughter Julie (Amandla Stenberg) does her level best to ruin everyone’s lives, is weak.
Elliot and Julie are both irritating, selfish characters who make unfathomable choices at every turn, and their exhausting messiness burns through any goodwill the audience might hold for them by the third episode. How none of the other characters straight up yeeted both of them into the Seine by midseason is the true mystery of The Eddy, one that will remain forever unsolved.
TV shows don’t need likable main characters to be good (HBO’s Succession is an endless parade of garbage humans and is still great art), but The Eddy needs its viewers to care about Elliot and Julie to make the show work.
Image: Lou Falon / Netflix
Otherwise, the show’s other primary mechanism of generating emotion — scoring big plot moments with in-universe performances of jazz music — falls flat. We get it, The Eddy. The jazzy music is demonstrating the characters’ jazzy feelings. The metaphor is valid, but instead of feeling poignant, the rampant substitution of music for story feels drawn out and overused. No quantity of trumpet solos can overwrite the fact that the emotions the solos are meant to enhance are shallow.
Overall, The Eddy is a visually and sonically interesting show that benefits from some great performances by actors who, save a handful, are largely unfamiliar to an American audience. Its lack of care in marrying the concept of a show that encapsulates the feeling of jazz to the entertainment objective of telling a good story, is where it fails.
Viewers who just want to see two-episode director and executive producer Damien Chazelle do his La La Land thing and revel in the glory of jazz music will like it. Others will wonder why the creators of this show didn’t do what they clearly would prefer and open up an actual The Eddy nightclub in Paris, where the music comes first and any responsibility to creating a coherent series comes a very distant second.
The Eddy is now streaming on Netflix.