Fleetwood Mac Authorize Their Own Story With ‘The Chain’

Fleetwood Mac have spent decades as raw material for other people’s narratives: unauthorized films, television series loosely inspired by the Rumours years, stage plays. The Chain, directed by Frank Marshall, is the band’s attempt to tell it themselves. It premieres on Apple TV on January 29.

The film stays with the 1974–2018 lineup: Stevie Nicks, Lindsey Buckingham, Mick Fleetwood, John McVie and the late Christine McVie. That is the commercially dominant era, the one that produced the songs most listeners know and the internal collapse that made them worth watching. The Peter Green chapters of the late sixties go unexamined here, which is consistent with how Fleetwood Mac’s history has generally been sold.

The “first fully authorized documentary” billing carries a caveat. All five members participated in the BBC’s one-hour 2009 film Don’t Stop. The difference is a matter of approval rather than access, and Marshall’s film is being positioned as the version with the band’s formal blessing behind it.

What The Chain promises is never-before-seen footage and new interviews. For a group this heavily documented, that is a genuine claim rather than a marketing formality. The open question is whether Marshall gets anywhere near the parts of the story that have been rehearsed to death, or whether authorization mostly means a more polished telling of the same Rumours-era excess. The teaser released so far is brief enough to give nothing away. The film’s worth will depend on how much of the band’s own account turns out to be actually new.