Historically, girl bands have been put together and managed by middle-aged men, often resulting in the gruesome situation of young women being told what to do, say and wear by those men in order to make the men as much money as possible. As much as I’m With the Band: Nasty Cherry (Netflix) is a fairly standard X Factor setup – a mentor develops a fledgling act, drawing on their own industry experience – it does, at least, offer a glimmer of a fresh take. The six-part show follows the progress of “alt-pop” group Nasty Cherry, who have been flung together by Charli XCX and her best friend and the band’s manager, Emmie Lichtenberg, from when they move into a house together to when they play their first live show, four months later.
The aesthetic is a riotous clash of Big Brother meets Drag Race meets Spice World, yet the mood is peculiarly mumblecore. Each episode is about 10 minutes too long, because there is so much lingering on the day-to-day business of the women simply existing. Charli loves eating in bed and has a wedgie. Debbie the drummer can’t open bottles. It becomes her thing, her USP: at one point, she hides from the cameras, laughing, because she doesn’t want her inability to open a wine bottle shown on television. This is an era in which everything from breakfast to sunset is broadcast for an audience: perhaps this is the content we deserve.
Netflix has a slightly scattershot approach to its own creations, and you sense that it often throws everything at a show so some of it will begin to stick. Given that its use of time is elastic enough to include the aftermath of a cat fart, I’m With the Band feels simultaneously rushed and ill-explained. There is little time given over to why any of this is happening. Emmie and Charli have handpicked the four members of Nasty Cherry, or at least I think they have, and brought them together to live in LA, so they can learn to be a band and write some songs. The group has been well cast, with just enough in common that they may bond into a ferocious force, and just enough to divide them that TV-friendly drama is all but inevitable.
There are two Americans. Chloe, the guitarist, is the most experienced musician, and fronts her own band, Kitten, which prompts the Mrs Merton-esque question of what could possibly have attracted her to the exposure of being in another band on such a wide-reaching platform such Netflix. Gabbi is a former ballerina and model who looks like a young Angelina Jolie has gone wild with a Billie Eilish moodboard; she has never sung before, but “she just had to be inspiring”, as Charli puts it. Then there are two Brits, which makes for some fun culture clashes and an emotional moment involving Marmite. There’s Debbie, previously a session drummer for Charli, and Georgia, a friend of Charli’s who had never picked up a bass until someone suggested she might make a good member of the band. There is pressure, everyone says, because this needs to happen quickly, though nobody seems to know why.
In their rush, Nasty Cherry do everything backwards. They have a launch party before they’ve written a song, or even played their instruments in the same room at the same time. They sign a big-name producer before they’ve booked their first live show.
Though transparently stagey, I’m With the Band is never terrible, largely because it has moments of winning self-awareness. All the band members marvel at the early attention they get while being entirely open about the fact that their association with Charli XCX has given them this “lucky fucking ticket”, as Georgia succinctly has it. Though I could feel the strings being pulled in every direction, I was hopelessly sucked in to the low-stakes drama.
By episode four, the excitement of it all has worn thin. There is a spectacular disagreement about whether the girls should work with men in the studio that may break the record for how many times people use the word “empowered” in the space of five minutes. There is a row about whether one member is respected enough for her contributions that ends in a showdown so ice-cold it would not have looked out of place in an episode of Succession. Still, I had started to care. It may not have ripped up the girl-group rulebook but, by the end, I was team Nasty Cherry all the way.
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