TV Review: GIRLS5EVA Is The Camp Comedy 2021 NEEDS!
Created by Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’s Meredith Scardino and Tina Fey, I immediately felt the Kimmy/ 30 Rock vibes. There is an outlandish brightness to these comedies that attracts you like Liz Lemon to a craft table of free donuts. Either way, there is a specificity to Girls5eva’s style that is 100% appreciable. It is unlike any comedy out there, and elevates Peacock’s Originals, along with setting up the platform to be distinctly camp.
Here is the basic plot: a Y2K pop band decides to reunite after a rapper samples their one-hit wonder, makes a massive hit, and their names are suddenly thrusted back into the music main-frame. Seeing a chance for a momentous comeback and each carrying a desire to escape their mundane lives, the now four, once five members, unite. Yet, working together/ working at all is not easy when egos, old concepts of femininity, and things like childcare are involved. DAMN! I am good at summaries!
From it ownership of The Office to the absolutely fantastic and vibrant Saved By The Bell and Rutherford Falls, Peacock feels like the home for “confetti comedy.” That is my name for camp laughs blended with glittery productions, fabulously loud characters, and witty banters delivered more quickly than the Gilmore Girls on a coke binge in Vegas. Girls5Eva hands out line after line of jokes; catching its audience like fishes to a hook. Moreover, it is unafraid to create characters that we wish to meet/ hope we never do: in both its cast and its guests. With features such as, Bowen Yang as a massive fanboy, Steve Colbert as a yuppie guru, and Andrew Rennells as the self-absorbed, beach blonde husband of Summer, Kev, the show is incredibly eye-catching, but nobody captures us quite like the Girls5Eva themselves.
Sara Bareilles is sweetly shines as Dawn; a working mom that finds the chance to get back to her old, singing ways to be a spiritual revival as much as musical one. Renée Elise Goldsberry as Wickie Roy MAKES ME LAUGH TOO HARD! She totally embodies the wannabe “superstar” of the group, and has some of the funniest instances in term of showing how the music industry can attract people like glittering moths to a glamorous fame. She is followed by the totally vain, ditzy symbol of 2000s Pop Stars, Summer (Busy Phillips), whose attempts at becoming a wellness influencer without being, necessarily, “well,” humors the hypocrisy of craving public attention. You want the world to see you without seeing yourself. Moreover, you want to guide that world without having any personal direction, which is why Paula Bell’s Gloria feels like an oddly, stabilizing force as the youngest member whom is now proud about her once hidden sexuality and a dentist. She rounds out a once 5 member group, one of the members being deceased, that is ready to take over the world that they feel took over them, which is why its attempted moments of tenderness are necessary but feel distractingly pushed in.
Listen! I AM VERY FORGIVING for first seasons and even second ones. I feel a show really picks up its “pizzazz” around season 3 and 100% believe they should all end between season 5 or 6 (lol!) Girls5eva is absolutely hilarious and distinct in its ways of displaying the vanity and sexism of a music world built on images but completely forgetting that even pictures change. These are “changed women” trying to reach for the height of their fame when they were still girls, and discovering, on the ride, that they were not really nice to each other or even themselves. That complexity enriches Girls5eva, but it comes in brief moments that feel forced compared to how easily the laughs grow. Thus, I am excited to see how Girls5Eva becomes an even crazier and more heartfelt tale on the journey of four women in a music industry that is about everything, EXCEPT THE MUSIC (lol!).
