More People Did These Things Than Watched Rock Dudes Snort Blow in HBO's Vinyl Premiere

HBO’s Vinyl—the romanticization of my literal nightmare of rock dudes snorting coke and yammering about the industry while you, a woman, sit there silently stewing—didn’t have a great debut on the Nielsen charts!

Sunday’s two-hour premiere—written by The Sopranos’s Terence Winter and Breaking Bad’s George Mastras—was directed by none other than Martin Scorsese, but even that big-name draw didn’t entice viewers to sit through it. Variety TV critic Mo Ryan broke down the viewer numbers for a few of HBO’s series debuts, and while it’s not quite a bloodbath, it is certainly not great.

A little refresher: Tremé was David Simon’s series about post-Katrina New Orleans, and a follow-up to The Wire; Luck was a show about horseracing that was canceled after one season because the horses kept dying; Newsroom was Aaron Sorkin’s romanticized look into the inner workings of broadcast journalism; The Leftovers is a series about people vanishing into thin air; and True Detective’s first season was about philosophy and God and flat circles and occult sacrifice and shit.

So in the scheme of things, 1970s rock music is theoretically a pretty populist premise; why did its premiere tank so thoroughly (particularly when its ad campaign included taking over the websites of at least two fairly high profile publications, New York Magazine and Vice’s Noisey vertical)? My guess is that the trailers, which have been airing for months, were perhaps a bit of a turn-off, as they mostly seemed to depict… rock dudes huffing rails and seeming to go into cardiopulmonary seizures before metaphorically popping a huge woody. (As punk icon Richard Hell wrote in his excellent review: “Cocaine is not like getting a cattle prod up your butt. Everybody knows that. Cocaine is sweet. A warm smile would suffice.”)

What could all of those potential viewers have been doing? Really, almost anything!