SNAPSHOT
The Get Down focuses on 1970s New York City – broken down and beaten up, violent, cash strapped — dying. Consigned to rubble, a rag-tag crew of South Bronx teenagers are nothings and nobodies with no one to shelter them – except each other, armed only with verbal games, improvised dance steps, some magic markers and spray cans. From Bronx tenements, to the SoHo art scene; from CBGBs to Studio 54 and even the glass towers of the just-built World Trade Center, The Get Down is a mythic saga of how New York at the brink of bankruptcy gave birth to hip-hop, punk and disco — told through the lives and music of the South Bronx kids who changed the city, and the world…forever. (synopsis (c) Netflix)
The Get Down has been described as a “rapper’s delight” by The Guardian‘s Alex ham who hails the show by Baz Luhrman as full of fun, music and an evocative depiction of a bygone era.
The title is drawn, he notes from a particular stylistic trick that DJs used to employ:
“Named after the funky break on a record that early hip-hop DJs would endlessly extend so an MC could rap over it, The Get Down is the second TV show to air this year set in 70s New York.”
The show he refers is Vinyl which only lasted a season before being unceremoniously dispatched to the TV graveyard by HBO.
Netflix is clearly hoping The Get Down, which will have cost it $160 million to cost – nothing unusual there with Luhrmann whose work is typified by cost and production overruns but also happily stupendous success with four of his films sitting comfortably in the top ten grossing Australian films.
Based on the trailer alone, which seems to beautifully captures the grittiness and decay of an era but also the hopefulness of its inhabitants determined to rise above their circumstances, The Get Down looks like it will be an immersive delight, a rich storyline augmented by Lurhmann’s typically lavish stylistic touches.
And best of all, it has an inspiring air to it, a resounding clarion call that life doesn’t have to defeat you and that you can rule the world.
Heady stuff of which great and enduring dramas are made.
The Get Down drops all its episodes 12 August.