Every character deals with an unexpected cross between their lives as they knew it and their lives as they could be, and whether a potentially painful change needs to occur for the promise of the latter to be fulfilled. More promisingly are the show’s unprecedented flirtations with emotional explorations, retained continuity, and challenging of status quos. You’ll also get some of the sour, strange obsessions with crass jokes about identity that seem to plague much of Fey’s oeuvre its very first, and premise-crystallizing joke, offers the stale and offensive comedy idea that a young Black rapper can be more intelligent “than he seems,” and other strange “this is from the perspective of a worried white woman” jokes casually permeate the rest of the episodes (one, involving Bareilles being unpromptedly afraid that the name of a cocktail is being misconstrued as a racial slur, literally made me go “ick” out loud). Yes, thankfully, you’ll get the smorgasbord of jokes you’re craving, and you’ll get the farcical, hyperbolic style of stories that go two steps past what you think can exist in our physical realm (a musical superstar appears as a hunger-driven hallucination played by Fey, to give you an idea). The overall filmmaking is one area I wish stuck more stringently to that Fey assembly-line approach.īut the show’s scripts also put one foot off the factory conveyor belt. No darlings have been killed in the editing of the show, making the show less darling overall. The entire spate of episodes is rhythmically out of whack, with strange editing and coverage choices seeming to cover up potholes, while joke tags regularly go one or two specifics past what is needed to hit a punchy, intuitive-feeling pace. This is wholly, and consistently, to the show’s detriment. Every single one watched for review is over the network TV sitcom model of 22 minutes, and some of them push past the 30-minute mark. Like Kimmy Schmidt before it, Girls5eva takes advantage of its streaming platform to take however the heck long it wants per episode. I hope she eventually finds permission and room to be as silly and high-energy as her castmates her propensity to play things “real” is noble, but often results in tonal whiplash.īut she’s not solely to blame for the feelings of inconsistency. When her bandmates label and call out her character flaws in that same Episode 5, it does not track, as I simply haven’t seen her embody what they’re talking about. And sadly, Bareilles does not work in this playground for me while I adored her songwriting work on fellow TV musical comedy Central Park, I find her disappearing into the margins of her own story.

As for our other leads, Pell gives us versions of performances we’ve seen her give in other sitcoms, though I appreciate the show’s willingness to deepen her archetype (especially in a lovely reconnective moment in Episode 5).

New tina fey comedy