TV series
2022 · 1 season · 6 ep · Drama
TMDB 7.6/10 (109 votes)
The story of a band of spotty, noisy, working-class kids with “no future,” who shook the boring, corrupt Establishment to its core, threatened to bring down the government and changed music and culture forever.
Created by Craig Pearce
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Pistol is a British biographical musical drama television miniseries about British punk band the Sex Pistols. It was created by Craig Pearce for FX and directed by Danny Boyle. The series follows Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones and the band's rise to prominence and notoriety. It premiered on FX on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in the UK on 31 May 2022.
The six-part series follows Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones and the band's rise to prominence and notoriety.
The miniseries, created by Craig Pearce, was given a six-episode order from FX in January 2021, with Danny Boyle directing all six episodes. Toby Wallace was cast to play Jones, with Maisie Williams among the supporting cast. Thomas Brodie-Sangster, Talulah Riley, and Iris Law joined in March, as filming began. Some filming was done in Hemel Hempstead.
Production designer Kave Quinn studied Julien Temple's documentary The Filth and the Fury as well as Andrew Marr's BBC docuseries The Making of Modern Britain to portray London as it was in the 1970s.
Esquire magazine said that "the commitment to the punk ethos of the Sex Pistols comes through in the making of the film itself." Director Boyle would let the actors run through scenes and entire performances, not using a traditional shot list. He matched the energy of punk by using cinema techniques such as split-screen editing, flashbacks, archival footage, freeze-frames, gaudy dreamscapes and slow-motion.
The concert footage and musical scenes were recorded live, without overdubbing or studio effects, and the actors portraying the Sex Pistols and Chrissie Hynde played the instruments and performed their own vocals.
Wallace (Jones), Slater (Cook) and Chandler (Hynde) had the benefit of meeting with their counterparts. Boon could not meet with Rotten due to the latter's disavowal of the project but he closely studied Rotten's stage presence to replicate it and read the books authored by Rotten. Jones also met with creator and writer Pearce to answer questions and provide his input. Cook was involved in the series, and gave his input as needed.
Tracks included in the series included many songs by the Sex Pistols and The Pretenders, other songs of the period, such as "X Offender" by Blondie, and "Evidently Chickentown", a poem by punk poet John Cooper Clarke, along with many older songs.
In 2021, while the series was still in production, Sex Pistols frontman John Lydon criticised the series, branding it as "The most disrespectful shit I've ever had to endure". Former bandmates Steve Jones and Paul Cook sued Lydon to allow Sex Pistols music to be used in the series despite Lydon's objections. They said they had the support of Glen Matlock as well as the estate of Sid Vicious, and cited a 1998 agreement that allowed a majority decision among band members. Lydon lost the legal battle that August.
Pistol premiered on FX on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore on 31 May 2022. The series was removed from Hulu and Disney+ internationally on 26 May 2023, after a downturn in subscribers and profits led to cutting over 50 shows.
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the series holds a 65% approval rating based on 62 critic reviews, with an average rating of 6.6/10. The website's critics consensus reads, "Danny Boyle's frenzied direction brings plenty of energy to this punk biography, but the rote conventions of a band's rise and fall make Pistol something of a misfire." On Metacritic, the series has a score of 60 out of 100, based on 28 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".
Angie Han from Hollywood Reporter wrote positively that "Pistol does do better than some in breathing a bit of life into that formula, first and foremost through a pair of exceptional performances...by Anson Boon, the intense 22-year old playing front man Johnny Rotten. If John is its [the show's] soul, Malcolm McClaren is its calculating brain. As played by Thomas Brodie-Sangster, he's a Svengali so relentlessly charming, that...[he] turns manipulation into an art form itself."
Empire's Beth Webb felt that "the performances vary in strength - but the collective scrappy energy of the ensemble under the director's guidance is undeniable."
NME's El Hunt gave a mixed review: "Pistol could've gone further - as much as it explores the pitfalls of rock'n'roll mythology, it occasionally falls into the very same trappings that it tries to scrutinize. But, taken at face value, this is a high-energy and creatively pieced-together look back on how punk rock, with Sex Pistols at the vanguard, swept the UK and beyond."
Jim Sullivan of Book and Film Globe wrote that "there's a verisimilitude here. Most of the time, you can suspend disbelief and feel like you're in on the scheme, observing the band as they stumble, scrap and score. There was a cartoonish element to the Pistols. But there's a richness and complexity to them as well and Boyle mines that. Boyle puts the Pistols at the forefront of the punk movement and I've got no quarrel with that, but he fails, by and large, to place them into the larger context of the punk explosion happening all around England: The Clash, The Jam, The Damned, many more. Yes, you get the sense that there's a wave of punk rock going on, but the Pistols seem insular and far more isolated from it than they were in reality.
Madison Bloom from Pitchfork was negative: "Pistol's script is full of grand manifestos and pep talks that turn flashes of rebellion into rote history lessons ... the screenwriter seems petrified that the audience will miss something...certain phrases are repeated to a comical degree...Boyle commits the same crime of over-explaining... With its ham-fisted dialogue and gaudy editing, the new FX/Hulu show Pistol offers a sanitized kind of anarchy."
Deadline Hollywood's Dominic Patter asserted that "Even with sneering classics like 'God Save the Queen' in the well-crafted soundtrack mix...[the film] limps along when it should roar ... [it] gets jammed up in the contradictions of the Sex Pistols where it could have reveled in them with revolutionary enthusiasm and clear eyes."
Speaking to The Guardian, John Lydon dismissed the series prior to seeing it as: "It's dead against everything we once stood for. The only thing you've got of value in your life, and you're going to cheapen that because you want an extra fiver? Not much of a human being there", and further commenting on the trailer: "It's karaoke, really. The voices, the way they're talking … it sounds like a bunch of kids from Tring, all discussing the latest calamities! That ain't it at all! It's so off.
Glen Matlock said he was very disappointed with the series: "I'm not disappointed that it came out, and I thought it was important that it went ahead because it was based on Steve's story and take on things. And he was the guy that formed the band - not John; Steve. But my portrayal, and particularly my leaving the band — I left the band; I was not sacked. That whole episode where Steve sacked [me] is just bollocks."
Pistol was nominated for Photography & Lighting, Fiction and Production Design at the 2023 British Academy Television Awards.
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Quotes via Wikiquote (CC BY-SA), each with its original source.
