Tara Ariano is a highly decorated Wig Cop™, and she’s got an ABP out for some criminal wig stylists.
The complex history of Fleetwood Mac has been told in books, documentaries, and one very memorable episode of (what else) Behind The Music. In 2019, fans who weren’t sated by all of those also got Daisy Jones & The Six, a novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid that fictionalizes the band’s story, imagining scenes that even the famously messy Fleetwood Mac wouldn’t expose to the public. Now, the novel has made it to the screen, in a limited-series adaptation at Prime Video. Staying true to the source material, it is mostly set in the 1970s, which means lots of crochet, lots of bellbottoms, and lots of wigs.
I can’t definitively trace my fascination with TV wigs to any single incident, but if someone suggested that I was radicalized by The Good Wife, it would be hard to argue. Those few who remember FX’s The Strain don’t remember it very fondly, whether because of lingering horror from its worm-eye billboards, or just from the offense we took to star Corey Stoll’s wig, a coif so unconvincing that I once adopted the persona of a Wig Cop, gruffly complaining about the fake-hair crimes some bozos think they can use to bamboozle honest citizens. Last summer, Vox contributor Chika Ekemezie investigated the issue in a piece with a headline as simple as it is provocative: “Why do wigs on TV look so awful?” Dear reader, it is my sad duty to tell you Daisy Jones & The Six has not avoided this curse.
The series is told in a faux documentary style, cutting between the band in their heyday and talking-head interviews that are supposed to have been filmed 20 years after The Six’s last-ever show in 1977. Episode 1 kicks off with shots of each member in 1997, situating themselves and making minor adjustments. At first, I thought, “Maybe they just cut corners on the ‘future’ wigs, since they don’t really need to move.”
Sam Claflin (who plays Billy Dunne, the band’s co-lead singer and songwriter) is right to look this annoyed: I’ve seen Jack Sparrows at Disney World whose lobs were more convincing than this.
And he’s one of the higher-profile members of the cast! (You may not know his name, but you saw him in The Hunger Games, I promise.) Riley Keough (who plays the titular Daisy, the other co-lead singer and songwriter) is nearly the most famous performer in the ensemble, and even her 1997 wig only looks good as long as she doesn’t expose her crown to the camera.
