Any way you label them, these chapters are a major improvement for a show that was always fascinating, occasionally dazzling, but suffered from a cluttered, even scatterbrained too-muchness, and that often seemed, like its titular crew, to still be finding its style and voice. Then again, as is often the case with this show, the best analogies are musical: Think of it as the second of two concert dates in a band’s inaugural tour, the performance where they find their groove and never leave it.
But the long hiatus between fresh chapters (tacitly acknowledged by letting the narrative skip slightly forward, from summer to fall of 1977) makes it feel more like a compacted season two. The Get Down episode guide will likely describe it as part two of season one. What picture are we seeing when we watch this new batch of episodes? It’s a multimedia work: television, movies, a novel, a scrapbook collage, decoupage, a montage barrage. Baz Luhrmann and Stephen Adly Guirgis’s 1970s musical melodrama about the birth of hip-hop and the fall of dirty-glorious Gotham is forever characterizing itself this way: like a rapper nimbly reframing a story as he tells it.
“Unfold your own myth,” blares a graffiti tag on the skin of a subway car in The Get Down.