It’s when it leans into that fascinating, cart-before-the-horse approach that the show really sets itself apart, creating an equivalence between the music and the drama that vibrates and resonates the way the deepest bassline does, a contact high that you feel in the pit of your stomach.

The series presents life as something that happens simultaneously with music—not just adjacent to it, but surrounded by it. Refreshingly, the camerawork tells the story without gimmicks—no slo-mo, no flashbacks, no dream sequences. The result is that time, too, seems to be composed of music, moving forward at the same tempo.

The first episode ends with the setting well established, thanks to a constantly moving camera that nervously picks up details of the cool, cluttered sets as it roams the faces in the club and pinpoints the weak spots of each character. ... Chazelle continues exploring the unsavory side of Paris in high cinematic style in the second episode, which is devoted to Julie and her world. Stenberg creates a sophisticated New Yorker who keeps a guarded distance from her father, but is still curious about his life and attracted to the creative atmosphere around him.

The four episodes I’ve seen have some narrative kinks to work out, to be sure, but the filmmaking is truly stunning at times, and it manages to capture an energy and a beauty that more polished series can only dream of.

If you liked the rehearsal scenes in Whiplash, you’ll enjoy lots of this. But where in that film they were in the service of a tight story, here they are the high points of swirling, indulgent episodes that last more than an hour.

In short, the atmosphere of the series is transporting, and the toggling between French (with subtitles) and English, and images of the less-than-glamorous parts of France we don’t generally see on scripted TV, add nicely to the exoticism. But the story line imposed onto the setting is awfully stale, as familiar as the ambience is not.

There’s naturalistic acting, and then there’s mumbling. And the first episode had a lot of mumbling, especially from André Holland. The Eddy is a pretentious mess of a show, and even the expert music that is interspersed through the first episode isn’t enough to save it. In fact, it makes things worse.