Sometimes shows like Girls5Eva get unfairly ignored due to circumstances beyond their control. For the comedy’s first two seasons, it was embraced, albeit by a relatively small audience, as it was one of the first shows to appear on the fledgling Peacock streaming service. We can only hope that the show’s transition to Netflix (which includes all past episodes and a new six-episode season) will allow it to get the wider audience it deserves. The comedy series about an early-aughts girl group looking to make a comeback as they approach their 40s was created by Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt writer Meredith Scardino, and she and her writer’s room are masters of both high and lowbrow punchlines, while the cast of talented comedians can pull off pratfalls and high notes in the same beat.
GIRLS5EVA (SEASON 3): STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: Forth Worth. The 4 (surviving) members of Girls5Eva, Dawn (Sara Bareilles), Wickie (Renee Elise Goldsberry), Gloria (Paula Pell) and Summer (Busy Philipps) perform their only current song with any traction, “Tap Into Your Fort Worth,” to a crowd of Texans, in an effort to kick off what they hope will be a national tour that puts them back in the spotlight.
The Gist: At the end of season two (because really, how are you supposed to remember what happens on shows that ended over a year ago!? “Previously Ons” should be standard viewing before every new season of a show begins, this is the hill I will die on), the women of Girls5Eva all seems resigned to the fact that Tour Mode wasn’t going to happen for them. Dawn learned she was pregnant with her second kid, Wickie fell in love with the Lunch Lord, a.k.a. Shawn, and didn’t want to leave him, and Gloria moved back in with her ex, Caroline. But then the unexpected happened: a jingle that Dawn wrote to promote Fort Worth (and its walkable downtown) took off, and they learned they had sizeable audience there. So despite all the reasons they had to stay put, they decided to go on tour.
There are a couple of key differences to the show this season compared to the first two: Every episode takes place in a different city – Fort Worth, Clarksville, Orlando – and the show welcomes John Lutz as their tour driver, Percy. (You may remember Percy from last season when he was introduced as the victim of several unwanted pranks on PBAG, which stands for “Pranked By A Girl”, the girls’ unaired hidden camera show.) The arrival of Percy is a welcome one, Lutz excels at self-deprecating comedy and playing lovable idiots, so he fits right in. With so many other supporting characters, including all the characters’ significant others, left behind in New York for most of the season, his arrival as their pitiable, hapless tour driver is the perfect match for the group’s own desperate, chaotic energy.
But touring brings up a lot of emotions and baggage for the woman: Wickie is desperate to finally hit it big, Dawn wants to repair the group’s problematic past, and newly single Gloria and Summer are trying to embrace who they are as independent women. Once they realize they have to get out of Fort Worth though and out of their comfort zone, the group and their act face harsh realities about how unprepared they are for stardom and what it means to hit the Big Time. Like a lot of us, they eventually have to face the question about whether the sacrifices the Big Time requires are actually worth it after all.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Girls5Eva feels as though it exists in the same universe at 30 Rock, a universe full of slightly unhinged celebrities (Wickie Roy is the answer to the question “What if Tracy and Jenna had a baby with even more delusional ambition than them?”) and fast and furious punchlines and callbacks. This makes sense since the creative teams who work on the shows (including composer Jeff Richmond, and producers Robert Carlock and Tina Fey) overlap, and both shows are loving odes to – and parodic distortions of – showbiz.
Our Take: Every season of Girls5Eva thus far has focused on our now-40-something girl group trying to make their comeback. In season one, they were in Jingle Ball mode, in season two they were in album mode, and in season three they’re trying to reconnect with the fans by going into tour mode. Being on tour means leaving your life behind for a while, and the show has made the pretty big choice to leave many of its supporting characters out for the majority of the season. Dawn’s husband Scott (Daniel Breaker) only has a few minutes of screen time all season, Kev and his lazy eye (both played by Andrew Rannells) are given one Facetime phone call to Summer, and Wickie’s normie boyfriend the Lunch Lord (Chad L. Coleman) only fares slightly better. (Also gone are most of the ’90s flashbacks that feature Ashley Park and Erika Henningsen and all references to Ghislaine, Wickie’s see-through piano.)
The absence of these supporting characters though, only helps to highlight the fact that this show belongs to its four main characters: the women of Girls5Eva are its biggest strength, and each of them gets to have their own secondary storylines throughout the season: Dawn, who is pregnant, is reveling in the only down time she’s had since before her first kid, Wickie has to reckon with the fact that her upbringing was not traumatic or dramatic enough to warrant a pop-star documentary, Gloria is on her own kind of sexual walkabout, and Summer is learning she’s a whole person on her own, untethered to any man.
Beneath its jokes, there are layers of empowerment and feminism (it feels like the jokes and messages here are directed primarily at the Gen X set, those of us who are grappling with parenthood, mid-life crises, and the fact that we were all sorta complicit in embracing problematic and exploitative 1990s-2000s pop culture) at the show’s heart. But the show doesn’t explicitly preach a feminist gospel, it delivers that message with Dawn’s quest to write the group more empowering music and Summer removing her hair extensions and dressing herself for the first time in her life. I’m dating myself here, but I read an interview with Ani DiFranco (in Spin Magazine, 1997! What a time! Ask me about my Steve Madden platform shoes!) where she said “folk singers take everything seriously but themselves.” That seems to be the mantra of Girls5Eva – Scardino, the metaphorical folk songstress in this comparison, and her team are not trying to take the show or these characters seriously, but the show is filled with messages about serious topics like Me Too, maternal healthcare, and the obstacles of female ambition. And yet, while so many of those observations are genuinely spot-on, the takeaway from the show as a whole is not political. It is, always, that it is one of the most densely-packed comedies on TV, relentless in its quest for laughs, and it almost always succeeds.
Sex and Skin: Gloria spends the bulk of tour mode trying to have sex with each of the 178 types of women in the world and gets tennis labia as a result of the strenuous activity. So, yeah, that’s the kind of sexual content you’re getting from this show.
Parting Shot: [SPOILER ALERT] In order push her bandmates, who are all perfectly happy to stay put at their Fort Worth residency, Wickie announces that she has used the entirety of the band’s savings to book them a gig at Radio City Music Hall on November 23rd (that’s Thanksgiving). “What if we can’t fill it?” Dawn asks. “We owe Tishman Speyer Properties $570,000 or they sue us to death. Consider our fire lit. You’re welcome!” Wickie tells her. And then she exits the Marriott Divorced Dads Suitelets in true Wickie fashion, yelling “Open!” at the automated sliding door, which obliges.
Performance Worth Watching: The show wouldn’t be nearly as successful without Renée Elise Goldsberry, who plays the group’s diva who spends most of her time living in her own distorted reality. But this season also features some terrific guest appearances from John Early as an evangelical state senator/”fetal citizen advocate,” Catherine Cohen as a Girls5Eva superfan, and Richard Kind as Richard Kind, that are all too brief and leave us wanting more.
Memorable Dialogue: “We’re staying in a Marriott Divorced Dad Suitelets! That one’s luggage is a garbage bag… The vending machine is filled with wrapped kids birthday presents!” a disgusted Wickie tells her bandmates as she begs them to leave Fort Worth in search of a new city and new audience. This is but the first of many jokes at the expense of Marriott’s premier weekend destination for dads with partial custody, and a perfect example of the ridiculous, hilarious universe this show exists in.
Our Call: STREAM IT! The latest season of Girls5Eva took a risk by making a few significant changes to its formula, but it didn’t suffer for it. The fact is that the talented actresses in the group, along with the show’s funny-because-it’s-so-ridiculous writing and songs are as solid as they’ve ever been and keep the show’s frenetic pace moving. I only hope that the inconclusive last moments of the season don’t mean cancellation because we need more weirdly wonderful TV comedies like this.
