As far as light diversions go, “Daisy Jones & the Six” did the trick for me. It won’t be on my year-end Top 10 list, and it’s lacking in the rock ‘n’ roll grittiness it is supposed to be evoking, and the story lines are quite familiar; but still, it was an entertaining bit of faux music history, with a vibrant lead performance by Riley Keough.
Amazon released the final episode (of 10) last week, so you can watch the whole thing without breaks if that’s your inclination. This particular drama won’t suffer from bingeing, I think; the episodes run together a bit. It is one of those shows that, in some ways, feels like a really long movie — a series version of, say, Bette Midler’s “The Rose.” If I had a cold, or just a day or two of heavy couching for whatever reason, “Daisy Jones & the Six” would be the right kind of viewing.
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These days, there seem to be two different kinds of series. There are those that have been crafted with a sense of distinct chapters — “The Crown,” for example, or “Breaking Bad,” or, at least early on, “The Handmaid’s Tale.” HBO is the best at this approach, with series including “Succession” and “The Last of Us” whose episodes have their own themes and structures. If you watched them all back-to-back, you’d miss the resonance of each one and the questions it raises.
And then there are those series — and this is not a put-down — that have been created to breeze through. You are meant to press the “Skip Intro” button and continue to move forward. When you put on “Bridgerton,” or “Dead to Me,” or “The Flight Attendant,” or “Daisy Jones & the Six,” you’re not necessarily being asked to savor the riches of each hour or half-hour. You’re in the stream zone, each episode a single car in a long train that’s rolling by.
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Matthew Gilbert can be reached at matthew.gilbert@globe.com. Follow him @MatthewGilbert.