The ascent of Amazon's Mozart in the Jungle at the Golden Globe Awards was unexpected but welcome. The show won Best Musical or Comedy Television Series and another Golden Globe, for Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series, went to Gael García Bernal, who plays the conductor in the show.
Mozart is promoted with the slogan: "Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music," taken from the title of the book the series is based on, oboist Blair Tindall's 2005 memoir of her professional career playing with ensembles including the New York Philharmonic and Broadway show orchestras. The series is actually less sensational than the promotion promises. Drugs don't get much play, sex appears mostly within romantic complications, and classical music is there, albeit in brief excerpts.
The adventures of maestro Rodrigo (Bernal), his New York Symphony, and the young, ambitious oboist Hailey (Lola Kirke), are a mixture of Tindall's book and more recent story lines, especially the impact of Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director Gustavo Dudamel's career on Bernal's character. (An important difference between reality and fiction is that Dudamel's exemplary family life is not shared by Bernal's maestro. But then the show would be less interesting.)
From its tentative beginning in 2014, Mozart gradually improved and now its future is fairly rosy. Recent episodes interspersed romantic and career complications with an earnest treatment of the orchestra's labor contract problems.
In the "Best Television Series, musical or comedy" category, Mozart in the Jungle was up against much better known shows and responses to the Mozart awards showed it. Kevin Fallon fumed, in The Daily Beast:
Amazon’s polite little romantic dramedy about people who play in an orchestra isn’t necessarily a bad show. It is, however, the worst show of the six that were nominated for Best TV Comedy. Social media was divided between confusion -- "What the hell is Mozart in the Jungle?" -- and outrage when the series defeated the likes of Veep, Transparent, Silicon Valley, Casual, and Orange Is the New Black for the award.