This article contains discussions of addiction.

In March of 2023, Amazon Prime Video released its highly anticipated adaptation of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s bestselling novel, “Daisy Jones & the Six,” to rave reviews from both critics and audiences. Developed by writing partners Scott Neustadter and Michael B. Weber — known for projects like “500 Days of Summer,” “The Disaster Artist,” and “The Fault in Our Stars” — the series charts the rise and fall of a band in the late 1960s and most of the 1970s while also featuring “interviews” with the band members twenty years after the band’s breakup in 1977 (sort of like a longer, more dramatic version of “Behind the Music”). 

The series earned a handful of Emmy nominations after it released its single season (which spans ten episodes), including outstanding limited series, lead actress in a limited series (for Riley Keough), and supporting actress in a limited series (Camila Morrone) — though it didn’t end up winning any — and was a great outing for Keough, co-star Sam Claflin, and the rest of the cast, but some people might be wondering: is it about a real band?

No. Daisy Jones & the Six is a fictional band. Here’s the deal.

Within the context of the show, Daisy Jones & the Six is a wildly successful band that skyrockets to fame thanks to their hit song “Look at Us Now (Honeycomb),” with frontwoman and lead singer Daisy Jones (Riley Keough) as the last to join the band just before they get big. The rest of the band is made up of guitarist and singer Billy Dunne (Sam Claflin), his younger brother and fellow guitarist Graham (Will Harrison), keyboard player Karen Sirko (real-life singer Suki Waterhouse), bass player Eddie Roundtree (Josh Whitehouse), drummer Warren Rojas (Sebastian Chacon), and, unofficially, Camila Alvarez (Camila Morrone), Billy’s loyal and long-suffering wife who also photographs the band on the road.

Again, it’s really important to note here that Daisy and her bandmates are an entirely fictional creation dreamed up by Taylor Jenkins Reid for her novel and brought to life by the actors, who do a pretty phenomenal job. (Again, Waterhouse is a musician who recently opened for Taylor Swift on her Eras Tour stops in London, and Keough just so happens to be Elvis Presley’s granddaughter.) The made-up band in “Daisy Jones & the Six” might not be real, but they’re definitely inspired by a very real band, especially when it comes to their romantic entanglements (and the drama that ensues).

Original author Taylor Jenkins Reid has been quite open — ever since the novel came out in 2019 — that “Daisy Jones & the Six” is based on the legendary rock band Fleetwood Mac, whose landmark 1977 album “Rumours” was quite famously made amidst a ton of interpersonal strife. Despite the fact that Fleetwood Mac members Stevie Nicks, Mick Fleetwood, Christine McVie, John McVie, and Lindsay Buckingham made genuinely incredible music together, they also freaking hated each other a lot of the time; the McVies even divorced while they were both still in the band, and Buckingham and Nicks had a troubled on-again, off-again relationship for years. 

In an essay for Reese Witherspoon’s production company Hello Sunshine in 2019, Reid said that one specific Fleetwood Mac performance really informed “Daisy Jones & the Six.” (Hello Sunshine produced the series.) “I kept coming back to that moment when Lindsey watched Stevie sing ‘Landslide,'” the author said. “How it looked so much like two people in love. And yet, we’ll never truly know what lived between them. I wanted to write a story about that, about how the lines between real life and performance can get blurred, about how singing about old wounds might keep them fresh.” Later, the author told The Guardian that she couldn’t stop herself from wondering about the pair’s relationship: “”It got to the point where I was driving in my car, and I thought: I just want to know if Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham slept together after ‘Rumours.’ I heard myself think that–and that’s insane. I feel so close to them, but that’s because they’re writing about universal things in a specific way that I have a connection to.”

Apparently, Nicks thinks the homage is pretty clear. When the show premiered, Nicks posted on X (formerly known as Twitter) and said she’d tuned in, musing, “It brought back memories that made me feel like a ghost watching my own story.” (Nicks also said she wished Christine McVie, her close friend, had lived to see it; the singer passed away in November of 2022.)

Unlike Fleetwood Mac — which toured as recently as 2018 and whose members could still be found publicly beefing well into the 2010s — the fictional Daisy Jones & the Six only stayed together for a handful of years before famously and abruptly parting ways after a concert in 1977. The split is due in large part to the fact that Daisy and Billy, who both struggle with addiction throughout the story, are quite obviously in love with each other — causing major problems with Camila — but the rest of the band isn’t exactly getting along either. (Billy keeps stealing solos from Eddie, Karen and Graham carry on a secret relationship that crashes and burns, and so on and so forth.) After they play that final show in 1977 in Chicago, they quietly and immediately split up, at which point the series reveals something huge.

The entire documentary framework gives away to the revelation that Camila died of cancer between 1977 and 1997; her and Billy’s daughter Julia (Seychelle Gabriel as an adult) has been making it to honor both the band’s legacy and the memory of her mother. Before her death, Camila filmed a plea for Billy and Daisy to make up — and potentially just be together after years of yearning — and when Julia shows that footage to her father, he goes to see Daisy just before the series comes to a close. So could there be a second season? Probably not; the single season spanned the entirety of Taylor Jenkins Reid’s book, but anything can happen. Still, whether you want to revisit “Daisy Jones & the Six” or watch it for the first time, it’s available on Amazon Prime Video.