Is Daisy Jones and The Six a true story? That's one of the big questions surrounding the new Prime Video series.
Daisy Jones and The Six transports us back in time to the rock and roll era. In the 1970s, we're introduced to two musical acts who are about to be catapulted to superstardom; singer-songwriter Daisy Jones, and a five-piece band from Pittsburgh fronted by Billy Dunne called The Six.
The two musical acts are thrown together by a record producer to form the titular supergroup that ends up crafting a hit record and heading off on a hugely successful tour. However, the band shockingly split up after a sold-out show in Chicago in 1977, and never revealed what went wrong. Daisy Jones and The Six sees the members finally spilling the beans, decades after they went their separate ways.
With so much drama at the show's core, some viewers are wondering whether the series is actually a true story. Read on to find out what you need to know.
Is Daisy Jones and The Six a true story?
Daisy Jones and The Six is not a true story. Though the show partly takes the form of interview-style sections with the bandmates in the present and is styled as a revelatory, tell-all look back at the band's history, it is not a true story.
The events of the Prime Video series are actually drawn from the 2020 best-selling novel of the same name by the popular author, Taylor Jenkins Reid, the writer behind The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Malibu Rising, and Carrie Soto is Back.
The band does exist, in a sense, as a version of the album they produce in the show, "Aurora" has actually been produced which you can listen to on streaming platforms right now.
That said, the story of Daisy Jones and The Six does bear a striking resemblance to the drama surrounding a very real band from the 1970s: Fleetwood Mac.
Is Daisy Jones and The Six based on Fleetwood Mac?
Taylor Jenkins Reid has made it clear that Daisy Jones and The Six is inspired by the dynamic that sprang up between two Fleetwood Mac vocalists, Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham.
The duo became part of Fleetwood Mac in 1975 after Lindsey Buckingham was asked to join the band. He came on board on the condition that his then-girlfriend, Stevie Nicks, could also come on board.
In 1977—ahead of the release of the band's landmark album, Rumours—Nicks and Buckingham called things quits, and it's thought that some of the songs on Rumors were inspired by the duo's changing dynamic.
In a 2019 blog post for Reese Witherspoon's production company, Hello Sunshine entitled "How Fleetwood Mac influenced Daisy Jones & The Six', Reid explains how she was fascinated by a Fleetwood Mac reunion show called The Dance.
Reid wrote: "When I decided I wanted to write a book about rock ‘n’ roll, I kept coming back to that moment when Lindsey watched Stevie sing “Landslide.” How it looked so much like two people in love. And yet, we’ll never truly know what lived between them. I wanted to write a story about that, about how the lines between real life and performance can get blurred, about how singing about old wounds might keep them fresh.
"Even after copious amounts of research about Fleetwood Mac and a host of other duos and bands, I’m still taken with that moment between them. I can’t help but marvel at the idea that, despite everything they’d been through, Stevie and Lindsey still loved each other then. Or how, despite what it looked like to us all, they no longer did."
Daisy Jones and The Six is now airing on Prime Video.
