Girls5eva, a musical comedy series created by Meredith Scardino and produced by Tina Fey and her frequent collaborator Robert Carlock, asks what happens when girl bands grow up. The show’s characters are members of Girls5eva, a Spice Girls-style one-hit-wonder act from the early 2000s. The five-girl group’s oeuvre included the zeitgeist-pandering “Tiny Butts Forever” (Two silver dollar pancakes in jeans/ This will be what people like forever) and an unfortunate flop, “Quit Flying Planes at My Heart,” released on Sept. 10, 2001. A Bush-era anthem, “I Feel Sexual About the Flag,” recorded at a country-music station called The ’Gasm, wasn’t enough to arrest Girls5eva’s slide into obscurity.
Time, and the times, moved on. The group’s unifying personality, Ashley (portrayed in flashbacks by Ashley Park), died after falling off an infinity pool. Dawn (Sara Bareilles) got a job at her brother’s Italian restaurant and became an anxious New York mother. Gloria (Paula Pell, Erika Henningsen in flashbacks) came out as gay, became a workaholic dentist, and made history with America’s “first same-sex divorce.” Wickie (a luminous Renee Elise Goldsberry) pursued a slew of embarrassing schemes to stay relevant. Summer (Busy Philipps) moved into a McMansion with her husband, an ex-boy-band-star-turned-media personality, and their daughter, Stevia.
After the rapper Lil Stinker samples an old Girls5eva tune in his new song, the women decide to reunite and stage a comeback. The first season chronicled their efforts to get past their interpersonal problems and general out-of-touchness in the hope of performing at Jingle Ball; their chaotic efforts were aided by an eccentric Scandinavian music producer (Stephen Colbert) and a hallucination of Dolly Parton (Tina Fey). The second season followed Girls5eva’s inept efforts to record and promote an album after getting signed to a label, with the quest complicated by Summer’s conservative parents (Amy Sedaris and Neil Flynn), a romantic entanglement with a school cafeteria “lunch lord” (Chad L. Coleman), and a surprise pregnancy.
The latest season (and the first appearing on Netflix) follows the women as they go on tour and attempt to drum up interest for a comeback show at Radio City Music Hall. Along the way, they encounter a famous British pop star traveling in disguise (Thomas Doherty), have a run-in with a Christian state legislator (John Early), and do a show for money at a rich woman’s nostalgia-themed birthday party. This is, after all, a show about indignity.
The characters’ bumpy road has been mirrored, somewhat, by that of the show itself, which was dropped by Peaco*ck after its first two seasons but picked up by Netflix for a shorter, six-episode third. That’s a relief: Girls5eva is light to the point of inconsequential but endearing and bright. The show has heart, and it’s stamped all over with the rapid-paced wit that Fey imparted on Mean Girls, 30 Rock, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.
Like those projects, Girls5eva embraces volume-shooting — there are so many jokes per minute that one that doesn’t land (and sometimes they don’t) will probably be immediately followed by one that does. Whether you find the show entertaining will probably depend on whether you find funny dense, culturally referential lines such as, “My feet are so perfect they look like they were meticulously drawn by a lonely anime guy,” or entertainment industry inside-baseball jokes like a character noting that a truck driver she sees reading a seaplane catalog must be a film set Teamster. As with 30 Rock and the others, there are frequent cuts to comic flashbacks or hypotheticals, though this time, they often take the form of musical interludes.
The decision to lean into the musical aspect pays off. Girls5eva’s songs — written mostly by Fey’s husband, the composer and producer Jeff Richmond, with lyrics by Scardino — are funny and sometimes strong enough musically to stand on their own as earworms. The show also benefits from the presence of two musical-theater veterans: Bareilles is a Grammy-winning singer-songwriter who scored and later starred in the Broadway musical Waitress, and Goldsberry is an actress and singer who won a Tony for her role in Hamilton’s original cast. The musical parodies are often very deft, with Dawn’s anxieties about raising an only child in New York segueing into a Simon & Garfunkel pastiche called “New York Lonely Boy.”
None of this is weighty stuff, and your own mileage may vary. But in watching Girls5eva, I developed an affection for the show and its characters. The new season’s truncated length feels like a bit of a disservice. We’ll see whether Girls5eva returns for a fourth season. I have hope. After all, this band has resurrected itself before.
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J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
