The second part of this Netflix original picks up where the Get Down brothers left off. The Get Down crew had a major success winning a rap battle and now they perform nightly at their own club. Ezekiel 'Books' Figuero (Justice Smith) is straddling two worlds as he works on his college essay before going out to perform a show. Mylene Cruz (Herizen F. Guardiola) has had success with her first hit but now must manage a crude record producer and the demands of her father Pastor Ramon Cruz (Giancarlo Esposito). Shaolin Fantastic (Shameik Moore) tries to pull Books back into the music business while also trying to maintain his drug dealing business by selling at their shows.The villainous Cadillac (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) still insists that this musical movement is fiction yet begrudges the Get Down brothers success. Ra-Ra (Skylan Brooks) falls for a girl in the Zulu brotherhood, though the members don't support what that the Get Down's rap show is a front for the drug dealing. Dizzee (Jaden Smith) writes to his lover Thor in prison as he draws the story of the Get Down. History catches up with Papa Fuerte (Jimmy Smits) as he hopes to develop a part of the Bronx but the law is also threatening to catch up.Check out more of this review and others at swilliky.com

This is a good show, it has so many things to it. Nostalgia most of all, those times look so interesting and deep. Some concepts are very nice, like the one that a friendship is like being like in a family. The car scene in the first season was intense and dramatic, got me a range of emotions. I binged season one almost compulsively, I was totally hooked by the story and made me crave for more. Mylene is one of the most beautiful girls I have ever seen. My favorite Character is the uncle, hands down. I also like the brothers dad.None of the kids has a particularly strong personality though which is sad, even Shaolin which is supposed to be the cool mysterious and talented kid, is unfolded later as a weak character, I kept hoping for him to get better. Maybe is the directing that made him weak, perhaps he was written as a strong character.I LOVE the real footage they added to it, I loved seeing how NYC looked like back then, it's perhaps one of the best things of the show. The first episode of season one was really cool, ultra bold start, well done. --- Season two SADLY got me less excited, perhaps for the animations that they added throughout, I mean, I they have this "street" style look but being an animator I didn't really enjoy them. I think they could've been so much better. Still respect for who made them but they made the entire show look too cartoony and it could've been way more dreamy and dramatic. They're portraying the gay kid as an alien (?), maybe because he's also an artist but that left me a little confused, anyways the relationship between these two is so sweet, they could've at least kissed at some point instead of leaving that part unsolved.Is this show aiming at young kids? there are a bunch of things that are kept on the surface. It started off like a Saturday Night Fever kind of vibe mixed with Kids and some Hip Hop stuff but it got more glamorous over the second season, less drama, more cartoons, less real if you ask me.Regardless if the facts happening in the show are real of not, its an entertaining show but I can totally see how it would pi** people off. Especially people that know about hip hop and/or have lived that stuff. It's a Buz Luhrmann production, this is a romanticized version of facts and didn't feel so real to me that I am so far away from that culture.

I think Justice Smith does an admirable performance in the first episode and he and Herizen F. Guardiola are together the only thing that have me grounded in this musical-style delivery Moulin- Rogue-for-hiphop play. If this was a Broadway show it would be spectacular and the other stereotypic and overblown characters could almost have been possible to forgive. But this isn't Broadway.With the recent decade of more or less "realistic" TV-series, in the sense that suspension of belief is possible while watching because of you're getting closely knitted to the story with lots of gritty and real details, Get Down comes off as a parody of an highly interesting musical era. Very little of what is presented is believable, if not for the details themselves but for how these are presented or told. That's clearly a stylistic choice, but it's concoction that doesn't gel well.I think some of the stylistic elements of the storytelling could have been acceptable had the attention to acting and presentation been better. It seems like what we get here is what the directors wanted to bring out from their actors, but it's hard to watch without feeling pain for how the potential is handled. The occasional overplaying mixed with good and somewhat believable performances is quite confusing even as it's clear there are some talent at hand. Maybe if you're in another state of mind can you make these disparate details come together, but if you enjoy the finer details of modern TV drama, as opposed to the fake feeling old TV shows typically brought with them and required that you had to accept that stern limitation, and you yet are open to new ways of storytelling, then chances are still that Get Down won't be something you can savour. The depiction of the night club owner and her son are too close to racist stereotypes and almost made me sick to my stomach. Details like that and others make classical Blaxploitation movies looking highly realistic in comparison. The Saxophone playing father, while sympathetic, also feel stereotyped even if you can accept that some fathers had some aspect of a stereotype with them in their persona or how they present themselves to the world. But there's a difference between a realistic presentation of that and a caricature. Where's the love for the characters created here? The street gang depiction almost makes you laugh at its silliness. One-dimensional at best as is true for many other details presented in the first episode. This is supposed to lure me in? Unfortunately not.The little glimpse of the roots of Hip Hop we get in the Vinyl TV-series are in comparison so much more attractive and real. That's a series with a story told with exaggeration, overplay and hyperbole, yet it's much easier to adjust to so you can enjoy the story being told. Not so with Get Down, where the stylistic choices get in the way of everything, including the story. You could say the same about Vinyl, but Get Down is actually worse.I had to turn off just before the end of the first episode, which is very rare. I have no hope for the other episodes. I really wanted to like this. Baz Luhrmann made me enjoy Moulin Rogue once even as I hate musicals, but where unrealistic storytelling works in a musical or theatrical show, the choices made here by the creators Stephen Adly Guirgis and Baz make me cringe. I'm out.

This is a great story if you never lived in the Bronx during the 1970s. Rife with revisions, omissions and straight up fabrications, it is the "fantastic" story of stereotypes, generalizations, archetypes and characters with no substance or historical grounding at all. This show gets everything wrong. Nice sets, cute costumes, too bad they are largely anachronisms culled from hip-hop story books and not by asking people who actually lived in those times. Far too unrealistic and revisionist for anyone who lived in this era. I wouldn't waste my time with this again, too bad, I can't get back the time wasted on the first 6. It was funny laughing at how wrong they got it, though.More like the Let Down! LOL Keep trying!