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girls5evasource · 16 days

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The funniest show on television is Girls5Eva, which transplanted from the backwoods of Peacock to the mires of Netflix for its third season. While a lot of shows have taken off after landing on Netflix — You, for instance — Girls5Eva, from the data available publicly, didn’t get many viewers on the platform. I’m no expert on the mechanics of streaming, but I have one radical explanation for why this is happening: There are simply not enough episodes of Girls5Eva available to watch. On Peacock, the show had two eight-episode seasons. Netflix has given it an additional six. That means that Girls5Eva has aired, in total, only 22 episodes, about the same number as a full-season order of an old-fashioned network sitcom like 30 Rock, to which Meredith Scardino’s series is deeply indebted (Scardino wrote on 30 Rock; Tina Fey is a Girls5Eva executive producer). Over a three-year period? This is simply not enough!

Sitcoms are built for mass production and consumption, with dynamics between characters designed to generate an endless stream of story lines, and it can take a season or two to fully gel. Girls5Eva is lucky enough to have a distinct sensibility and a strong cast from the start, but it hasn’t had the space to work through all the possible material. There’s so much to mine in flashbacks to the girl group’s checkered early-aughts past, in Wickie’s failed solo career, in Summer’s wackadoo Christian upbringing, in Gloria’s fraught lesbian drama, and in Dawn’s attempts to find her own way as a songwriter (plus the larger meta arc of Sara Bareilles coming into her own as a comedic actor). Season three, in which the crew goes on tour around the country, tries to cover so much ground it’s like a distance runner sprinting at her vO2 max. The overarching plot — they want to perform at Radio City Music Hall — encroaches on all the fun along the way, rushing past a guest appearance from Cat Cohen, the reveal of Wickie’s real backstory, and an intricate Harry Styles parody. Sitcoms should be about all the fun everyone is having along the way, and we’ve lost that.

But there is another and perhaps more important reason that we need longer seasons of Girls5Eva: holidays. Network sitcoms, airing on a traditional schedule, have the opportunity to set episodes around the holidays near which they would air; think of the Thanksgiving episodes of Friends, The Office’s Christmas episodes, 30 Rock’s impeccable use of Leap Day. In my ideal universe where Girls5Eva has 22-episode seasons, Netflix would also abandon the binge strategy and air those episodes weekly, but that’s not a necessity. You could still drop them all at once, which gives me the opportunity to revisit the holiday episodes as those holidays occur throughout the year. If you need convincing, here are my suggestions for some holidays the Girls5Eva might celebrate:

Christmas (duh): Dawn tries to write a Christmas song; Wickie reveals a longstanding feud with Mariah Carey (she claims one of the items from her riff rolodex appears in “All I Want for Christmas Is You”; Mariah does not know her).

Thanksgiving: The girls try to book a gig at the Macy’s Parade (as Peacock actually had the stars do, to the confusion of my parents watching at home) while also atoning for their past sins at the event (revealed in flashback).

Valentine’s Day: Gloria revisits a past relationship with Taylor Lautner (she was his dentist).

Tax season: Summer reveals she hasn’t been paying taxes for years (thought you were covered if you already paid your church).

Presidents’ Day: Dawn tries to write a song about Lincoln being sexy, inadvertently offends a gay activist group.

Pride month: Return of Bowen Yang’s lip-sync influencer.

Cuffing season: Big for Gloria.

The Feast of San Gennaro: Big for Dawn (why is the show so all-in on Sara Bareilles being Italian??).

V-E Day: Wickie and Dawn’s husband, Scott, discover their mutual fascination with the Eastern Front: “I spent a lot of time touring post-Soviet states, okay!”

Casimir Pulaski Day: Gloria has beef with Sufjan Stevens.

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girls5evasource · 16 days

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Now that we’ve gotten to the end of Girls5eva season three, there’s just 6 much we’ve seen the girl group sing about: the hotness of boys in space, UTIs, knee surgery. But in the quest to be famous 5eva, one song has to be No. 1. Using a highly scientific process known as “listening to my own taste,” I ranked the output of Girls5eva thus far, focusing both on whether the songs are good as stand-alone songs and whether they are actually funny. For the sake of clarity, I stuck to the music available on the show’s official cast recordings, which does leave off several gems we only hear for a few seconds onscreen. (Why didn’t we get a studio version of Dawn’s song where she uses every possible definition of the word “set”? This is a question I can only yell fruitlessly at the screen and hope for a response.) Until then, we will make do with this list of the excellent Girls5eva material that is available on a music-streaming service near you.

32) “U Ready?” A filler song that is itself a joke about filler songs, you have to admire the number of ways the Girls5eva writers have the group stall for time. The delivery is very funny, and we get all the girls (including Ashley Park) doing their best ready-for-MTV voices to confirm they are, indeed, “in the house” and “ready.” However, the concept is better as an elaborate joke than a song, per se. Best line: “If you’re ready, could you say ‘ready’? Because you could be ‘in the house’ and not ‘ready.’”

31) “Home Alone Doorknob” This is barely a song, but man, it’s a funny metaphor for what happens to your clitoris when you get horny. Best line: “It’s gonna get sexy, so watch out, Joe Pesci!”

30) “The Splingee” Another exercise in specific girl-group humor, Girls5eva describes how to do a “dope” dance move that is supposedly taking the world by storm. It involves whipping your hair, doing figure eights with your waist, blinking with two eyes, and getting all shy like you want to cry. The instructions end with the note that “the only thing left to do is repeat it two more times to make one complete splingee.” Honestly, it sounds like a home workout I should try. Best line: “Grind up on a ghost, then shake it out.”

29) “Who U Know” A solo performance by Jeremiah Craft’s Lil Stinker (who later gets canceled and rebrands as a country act), this is a send-up of name-dropping rap singles, with Stinker just listing everyone he knows, from his mom to his friend’s mom to Alfre Woodard. Best line: “From Zendaya to Zen-die-a!”

28) “No Strings” Gloria spends season three trying to hook up with every type of woman, but realizes that she’s a romantic after all. Here, she’s trying to embrace a no-strings-attached dynamic through a nonsensical folk tune that’s about a couple chasing the moon in an airplane powered by love. Best line: “A morning that never came until the coroner said to the wizard ‘time of death,’ the same.”

27) “Line Up” ”This is the song that launches Girls5eva’s comeback, since Lil Stinker samples “Famous 5eva” on it. We’ll get to their original hit later on, but the Stinker side of it is pretty generic as a placeholder for the kind of song that might sample something from the early 2000s. Best line: “I know you wanna light up, forever 5eva enough.”

26) “Thinking About Myself” One of Dawn’s stabs at songwriting early in season two, this is a fairly direct ballad about self-involvement. It does have some great zealous grandstanding vocals from Renée Elise Goldsberry, though. Best line: “Crying harder than anyone at a funeral for a great-uncle I barely knew.”

25) “Space Boys” In the chronicles of Girls5eva’s adventures in dating, here we have them going on an interstellar boy-kissing mission. Sadly they don’t have a TARS to keep them company, but after checking every planet they can (including “the stars”) they find some space boys (“more exotic than a waiter from France!”). On the show, the song accompanies some flashbacks to a young Gloria trying to avoid making out with actual boys, but solely as music, it’s just a low-key sci-fi jam. Best line: “We found a planet full of girls, but we left!”

24) “Later” An empowerment song in the genre of “Brave,” sung of course by Sara Bareilles, but about procrastination. The drum and piano orchestrations are so inspiring it’s easy to ignore that the message is that you really don’t need to do anything right now. Best line: “Now’s the not the right time, let’s aim for next year when we’ll have no fear, maybe by then the problems got solved by themselves all on their own.”

23) “Boyz Next Door (Puber-Dude)” To match the queasy sexualization of the Girls5eva, this number offers up the chance to objectify the just-recently pubescent members of Boyz Next Door, who have become the “hottest boys in the cul-de-sac” with a “Backstreet’s Back”–style anthem of their own. Who could resist their thin little mustaches, awkward growth spurts, and bland conversation? Best line: “Floppy hair, greasy brow, Adam’s apple going pow-pow-pow.”

22) “Sweet’N Low Daddy” Another vault track: In season three, the adult members of Girls5eva are pretty embarrassed by the message of their old hit about the benefits of dating an older man, but man, it’s pretty catchy, so you can understand why Cat Cohen’s character took it as gospel. Their ideal daddy has parents you never need to meet because they died during Nixon, and, of course, the song ends with the crucial question: “Real talk, when are you going to die?” Best line: “Don’t need to graduate, because we’re elder bait!”

21) “Can’t Wait 2 Wait” Back in the day, Busy Phillips’s Summer and Andrew Rannells’s Kev collabed on this break-out Christian-pop single about the joys of not having sex yet. Its fun hook and a peppy atmosphere bely the sheer grossness of the overall message. Best line: “Premarital urges aren’t itches to be scratched, so look up medical oddities until those feelings pass.”

20) “Daughter Hero” Renée Elise Goldsberry gets to do a groovy ’90s ballad with Wickie in celebration of her own generosity to her mother, never mind the fact that she comes from a solidly upper-middle-class family. She buys her mom a house, a house that’s significantly less nice than the one she already has! Best line: “Daughter hero, like if Jesus had a sister!”

19) “New York City Moms” An obvious sequel to “New York Lonely Boy” (more on that below), this song brings on Ingrid Michaelson(!) to perform an ode to the women of the city who have chosen to wait to have kids. A celebration of the moms who have “bumps poking out of Eileen Fisher” and are “judged by their husband’s out-of-town sister,” the Girls5eva writers can riff endlessly on very niche New York micro-communities, and bless them for that. Best line: “Spent their 20s in a disco, still younger than moms in San Francisco.”

18) “Summer Brings the Fall” Kev’s best attempt at a torch song involves an increasingly convoluted series of attempts at wordplay that I can’t help but respect. It starts out with “thought you were for ev, thought you were for Kev, you were like whatev, now I pray to heav … for strength” and just gets more forced from there. Best line: “Thought I was your male, cause you’re my holy grail.”

17) “Is There a Me?” Season three brought Busy Philipps a short but sweet bit of soul-searching in which Summer questions if she has any identity of her own, or if her personality has just been a series of attempts to please guys. Points for Philipps showing off some vocal training, deductions for the amount of Netflix cross-marketing involved. Best line: “Do I even like The Witcher, or is it just to please a mister? And what is The Witcher? I watched 40 minutes and I’m still not sure!”

16) “Inside My Sweater” Girls5eva’s music industry gets awfully specific with its parody of a Harry Styles–type sensitive boy hounded by mobs of fans named Gray Holland, played by Gossip Girl alum Thomas Doherty (he also played a similar role on the late, lamented High Fidelity Hulu reboot). As far as sound-alikes go, this Harry–slash–Shawn Mendes low-key bob is eerily accurate but also somehow a successful earworm, especially in the way Doherty refuses to ever pronounce the “r” in “sweater.” Best line: “Come dance and cook and make sweet love with me, inside my sweater!”

15) “Welcome to Now” Doherty’s soft-boy star Gray Holland returns, against his own will, in a pop hit constructed by his label “because Clause 46B, Paragraph Q of the artist’s contract grants the company use of postmortem generative voice cloning.” It’s the funnier of the two Gray Holland songs, and the beat’s so sensual you may miss that it quickly becomes an ad for the deals available at Best Buy. Best line: “Best Buy, Best Buy, Gray Holland loves Best Buy. Tablets, projectors, and more. You’re the best, bye!”

14) “Larry’s Song” The girls get their Taylor’s Version moment with this kiss off to their former manager that references many of the show’s recurring jokes about the indignities of early aughts fame, including him promising a steak knife to whoever seduces Carson Daly. The twist by the end is that they’ve finally gotten some financial and personal control, and thus, “everything we do belongs to us.” Best line: “Only let us eat crab, cause you can’t get fat from food that’s so damn hard to get at.”

13) “At the Beep” No, you’re tearing up thinking about a fictional character who died in an infinity-pool accident. In this episode, Gloria finally gives up on her conspiracy theories about Ashley’s death and accepts that she might really be gone. (I do wonder if Ashley Park would’ve been available for a longer run in season two if Emily in Paris hadn’t gotten so big.) This results in a somber number where girls say good-bye to Ashley through her still-active (because Gloria has been paying) answering-machine service. Best line: “It should have been me.” “I did a lot of cocaine, so much cocaine.”

12) “Get It Off Your Chest” In a moment of confession and healing in season three, the women of Girls5eva share their darker secrets with each other and their audience. The result is a series of tightly written jokes from the show’s writing staff: Wickie only likes people who “like me,” “but be careful, if you like me too much, it has the opposite effect and I find you desperate,” Gloria doesn’t trust stand-up comics who are too in shape, Summer hasn’t listened to a voice-mail since 2015, and finally, Dawn delivers my favorite … Best line: “Every year when my son’s school sends out the class list with parents’ names, the first thing I do is Google them to see what they paid for their apartments.”

11) “Momentum” Starting off season two, the girls have got momentum, yeah, um, it’s their moment (bless you, Jeff Richmond) with a song that’s relatively straightforward within the Girls5eva canon but is also a solid earworm. I have to respect that groovy baseline, too. Best line: “Unstoppable, this unst-unst ain’t toppable.”

10) “Tap Into Your (Fort) Worth” A canny marketing move: The girls of 5Eva plot a way to secure a captive audience by writing a song about an American city nobody else has written a song about. The result is a clever ode to Dallas’s overlooked sister, declaring that “cow town is a wild town with a walkable downtown” and trumpeting the fact that the Trinity River is, in some places, now actually swimmable. It’s enough to make you want to consider booking a flight to DFW, maybe just as a connection, but still. Best line: “Some say Omaha Zoo is second-best, but that’s a lie because their red panda is always inside. It’s never out on the tree, yeah!”

9) “I’m Afraid (Dawn’s Song of Fears)” Sometimes you just have to let Sara Bareilles loose with a piano and sing like she’s performing “Gravity.” Here, Dawn’s attempt to write a song on her own ends with her just listing things she’s afraid of, from the fact that she might thrive under Scientology to her fear that she’ll text a pic of her vagina to her dad. There’s something very funny to me about the way Bareilles says “my hummus is fungus” and I have to own that. Best line: “I’m afraid that the second I leave town I’ll get a UTI. Why can’t they sell those pills over the counter? I don’t need a doctor, I know exactly what it is.”

8) “Yesternights” Finally, a full taste of Wickie’s solo album, a work absolutely choked by melisma and sung impeccably by Renée Elise Goldsberry. It’s, as she sings, “gorgeous and sensual” and also “life fancy,” and also “dancing, yearning.” You could probably slip it on a sex playlist and nobody would notice, and frankly, we need an eight-minute version. Best line: “But tonight, there is no night or tomorrow night / Or any future night / ’Cause you’re only in my yesternight of nights.”

7) “The Medium Time” Sara Bareilles wrote the Girls5eva’s season-three finale hit song, which is about being inspired not to aim for immense fame, but a reasonable, medium level of attention. Bareilles is so good at selling the earnest, heartfelt feeling behind the song that you may forget that the wise man who told her this advice, in the universe of the show, was actually Richard Kind. Best line: “The middle is the riddle of it all, and the medium time is just fine for now.”

6) “Dream Girlfriends” The satire of Girls5eva cuts deepest here, in this song from their original run about all the ways they’d be willing to debase themselves to appeal to men. The list includes the fact that their dads are dead, that their moms are overtired so there’ll be no pushback, that they want to watch you play darts and love watching stand-up (but not by women). “Dream Girlfriends” cuts both ways, managing to make the men it’s supposed to appeal to sound pathetic as well. The girls are short so they don’t know you’re bald! Best line: “Tell me again why Tarantino’s a genius.”

5) “Bend Not Break” Near the end of season two, the women of Girls5eva realize their best song is actually about Gloria’s knee surgery. Metaphorically, it’s really about how they have to learn to compromise and acknowledge each other’s weaknesses to support their success, but there is also literally a joke about how she uses a cane. Anyway, it’s got a groove that’s hard to shake and does really make you want to dance (carefully, in a way that doesn’t risk further knee injury). Best line: “We got our secret weapon already, and it’s got eight legs, four smiles, and a cane.”

4) “Famous 5eva” Perhaps the best theme song in the vast universe of television today, here Girls5eva embraces the joys of counting by promising they’ll be famous 5eva — ’cuz 4eva’s too short. Those synths have an addictive crunch, and there’s something about the way they describe the series of cars they’re driving in (first a Lexus, then a Mercedes and then a Maserati) that’s gleefully ridiculous. The show has to make you believe the girls really are talented, and that there’s something joyful about watching them perform. This does both. Best line: “We’re Girls5eva, could we get a high SIX?”

3) “B.P.E.” Put your hands together for a “We Are the Champions”–style celebration of big pussy energy. Girl5eva’s absurdist answer to “WAP” celebrates their “Vitamin P” with some gospel-choir-esque harmonies. And the remix, which outdoes the original, adds in some church bells to heighten the energy. It will make you tap into whatever B.P.E. you have of your own. Best line: “Square feet, I’m going for miles, upgrade, taking up the aisles, open up those classified files from the Department of Treasury.”

2) “New York Lonely Boy” The best of the Girls5eva songs in terms of straight joke-writing, “New York Lonely Boy” applies a Simon and Garfunkel sensibility to the tales of hyperarticulate soft boys who know too much about mixing plaids and the dangers of restaurants on the corner (they just try too hard). Its comedy is sort of tangential from Girls5eva’s overall focus on the music industry, but it’s so perfectly realized that it doesn’t matter. Any show that can deliver such a specific encapsulation of a type — to the extent that I now think of various former St. Anne’s students who’ve became indie celebrities (okay, just Lucas Hedges) as New York Lonely Boys — deserves to run forever. Best line: “His playground is the lobby, has a palate for wasabi.”

1) “Four Stars” If “Famous 5eva” had to establish Girls5eva as it was, then “Four Stars” has to do the work of making you believe the second iteration of the group has come into its own. It does this delightfully well, with an anthem about embracing your imperfections that includes plenty of tossed-off jokes from each of the band members. (I’m particularly fond of “women are an ocean of secrets!”) Plus there’s something great about the harmonies of everyone singing “four stars” together. I have put this on exercise playlists, and it works! Best line: “The best things in life are free, that’s why rich people never carry wallets.”

#article #music #long post

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