Agent Elvis, Netflix’s improbably scabrous new animated series, takes one of popular culture’s most poignant moments and turns it on its head. It begins with Elvis Presley’s remarkable 1968 Comeback Special on US television, when the singer returned to a live, stripped-back stage after a seven-year absence, and reminded the world what it had been missing with a performance of sweat and grace.
It should have been a turning point: no more pulpy movies, plenty more raunch in the tank. But it didn’t turn out that way, and the singer’s heartbreaking decline commenced almost instantly. In the gleeful counterfactual account of Agent Elvis, the concert becomes instead a catalyst for the singer’s recruitment into a top secret organisation to “infiltrate, instigate, appropriate, and fumigate . . . to keep America safe”. Elvis becomes the superhero that his cultural status deserved all along.
The result, all bad taste and cheerful obscenities, is genuinely funny and weirdly satisfying. The singer and his sidekicks, who include a cocaine-sniffing chimpanzee, are deployed to twist some key moments in pop history — the Altamont concert, the Manson murders — into more wholesome outcomes. Call it a Once Upon a Time In Pop Culture version of a troublesome decade.
Matthew McConaughey in the lead role and Priscilla Presley, playing herself, are audibly having a blast, revelling in the adults-only vibe. But which adults would these be? Many of the references scattered in the manga-styled shoot-outs will surely make much sense only to the over-sixties (who, to be fair, may well be turning into the most avid consumers of trippy cartoons). “If I wanted to hang out with a bunch of shitbag hippies, I’d return Dennis Hopper’s phone calls,” Elvis brusquely tells a member of the Manson family. Why wouldn’t you hang out with a hippy? Who was Dennis Hopper? And who returns phone calls?
If the 1960s rock scene had rather too many brutal moments to warrant the expression of nostalgic yearnings, the same can less easily be said of the following decade’s cultural epicentre. The mellow doodling of Californian soft-rock is revisited in Amazon Prime’s Daisy Jones & The Six, featuring — a little spookily — the real-life granddaughter of the real-life Elvis and Priscilla, Riley Keough.
Here was a time and a place that could frankly have used a marauding chimpanzee or two to liven things up. Amid the hair and denim and introspection, Daisy meets Billy (Sam Claflin), who is trying to get a band together. They chafe against each other’s auras, until they realise that the musical chemistry between them is a winning formula. The music and the relationship traumas ring true — think of a combination of Fleetwood Mac and, well, other members of Fleetwood Mac.
There are soppy moments and a little too much flailing, but there is also plenty to like here, notably the charismatic lead performances from Claflin and especially Keough, who sings and twirls like Stevie Nicks, and manages to convey vulnerability, self-confidence and suspicion of an unreliable world all at the same time. (The homage to Nicks and her bandmates is meticulously realised, most obviously in the crackling riffs and rolling tom-toms of “Let Me Down Easy”, which could easily be a Rumours out-take.)
It is clearly absurd to talk about an age of innocence with regard to a time of ruinous drug-taking, vicious sexism and devouring narcissism. But here are the people who barely feature in Daisy Jones: managers, agents, marketing executives, advertising campaigners, corrupt disc jockeys, bankers. In short, the money people. We all know what happened after the 1970s. But in this enjoyable romp, based on the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid, the song really is the thing, and the rest is just background.
That’s very much not the case in Amazon Prime’s artful mini-series Swarm, from Donald (Atlanta) Glover and Janine Nabers. Here, the focus is on the most dispensable part of pop’s ecology, the devoted fan, Dre (Dominique Fishback, outstanding), whose obsession with superstar Ni’Jah (another piece of TV-à-clef: read Beyoncé) leads to some very dark places.
The least important thing here is the song, and its singer for that matter, who makes no substantive appearance whatsoever. Instead, we are taken straight into Dre’s opaque and convoluted psyche, in which misplaced passions for art turn into violence against the blameless.
In one pathos-laden episode, Dre is analysed by cult leader Eva, played by a persuasive Billie Eilish. “Your relationship with your phone . . . it’s linked to trauma isn’t it?” asks the pseudo-therapist, summing up most of what has gone awry in 21st-century pop culture. Where, one might ask, is Dennis Hopper’s number when you most need it?
‘Agent Elvis’ is on Netflix. ‘Daisy Jones & The Six’ and ‘Swarm’ are on Amazon Prime Video