Critic Reviews

Beyond the sterling performances and addictive soundtrack, what carries The Get Down is the sheer passion infused into every element in this immense production.

An intoxicating mosaic of choreography, wordplay and music. [8-21 Aug 2016, p.16]

Those too young to remember will be enthralled with the show’s energy and talent--and with Luhrmann’s drive to resurrect a lost world and make it beautiful again.

The almost 90-minute pilot, directed by Luhrmann, takes stylistic leaps unlike any other series. Without Luhrmann’s hands-on approach, the subsequent five episodes available Friday lose a bit of their pep, but none of their appeal, as the story tunnels down into the lives of these young people.

Guirgis’s language is authentic and raw, and tethers Luhrman’s gauzy-romanticized world of the South Bronx to the ground. Best of all, the cast--mostly young and mostly newcomers--has figured out how to make this visual and stylistic gumbo gel.

The show’s pastiche resolves into a gorgeous, fantastical tapestry of music legend and urban history, a reclamation of, and a love letter to, a marginalized community of a certain era, told through the unreliable tools of romance, intuition, and lived experiences. All that can be alienating, but simultaneously, the show feels like vital, radical work.

George, Luhrmann, and the show’s many collaborators have given us a grand, sometimes overwrought, precise show that captures a specific time in pop history better than it’s ever been shown on television.

It is unabashedly romantic, sentimental and crazy. At times, it is too much of a good thing, approaching total chaos in its non-stop flurry of activity. And yet it is one of the most consistently ambitious things that has ever aired on television, unafraid of the transformative power of love and art.

It’s lyrical, vital, upbeat, extreme, sprawling, hackneyed, flawed, and easy to forgive.

It is a thing by turns, and even simultaneously, ridiculous and sublime, romantic and overwrought and the most genuinely moving precisely when it’s at its corniest.