On TV’s new musicals, every episode is opening night
NEW YORK — At a Queens Studio lot, on a frigid Monday in November, the actor Jonny Beauchamp, in wig, fake lashes, gloves and platform heels, took a deep breath — as deep as his flame-colored corset allowed — and readied himself for the next take.
On “Katy Keene,” a “Riverdale” spinoff on the CW, Beauchamp plays Jorge, an aspiring Broadway chorus boy who also performs as his drag alter ego, Ginger. This episode, the sixth, would see Ginger competing in a drag pageant at Molly’s Crisis, an outrageous, loving homage to the Greenwich Village piano bar Marie’s Crisis. For the talent portion, Ginger would sing Beyoncé’s “Pretty Hurts.”
“And let me tell you, honey,” he said gesturing to his corset, “this hurts.”
Although he had recorded a backing track the night before, he insisted on singing live instead of lip-syncing, “to give it that extra verve,” he said.
He isn’t singing alone. This winter, on networks and streaming services, other characters are joining in — in church, on the sidewalk, in restaurants, bedrooms, rehearsal rooms, openplan offices and pour-over coffee bars. They are singing new songs and old ones, show tunes and pop hits, rock and rap and the occasional hallelujah chorus.
New shows like “Katy Keene” and “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” a musical procedural on NBC, join fall arrivals such as “Perfect Harmony,” a singlecamera comedy on NBC; “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” a mockumentarystyle series on Disney Plus; and “Soundtrack,” an hourlong drama on Netflix. Each includes at least one musical number per episode, often many more.
More musical series are in the works, like a collaboration among Alicia Keys and the “Greatest Showman” composers Benj Pasek and Justin Paul for Showtime and Damien Chazelle’s “The Eddy,” set in a Paris nightclub and bound for Netflix. MGM is developing a Billy Joel jukebox anthology. The Chainsmokers are producing a Freeform series. Remember the musical episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” when a demon came to town and made everyone sing ballads and patter songs? Television is like that now.
“Musicals are no longer nerdy,” said Tim Federle, the showrunner for “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series.” Or maybe more nerds have made it to pitch meetings.
Either way, programming executives have pegged musical series as a way to break out amid TV’s ever-growing glut. New series “are looking to stand out but also to really connect to audiences,” said NBC executive Lisa Katz. “It’s undeniable that music is something that people connect to.”
Broadly, and with exceptions, the musical surfeit speaks to impulses that are both utopian and mercenary. On the one hand, musicals are a pleasure and an escape, an antidote to the antihero. In an era of atomized programming, their soundtracks — which range from the Beatles and Dolly Parton to Nicki Minaj and Imagine Dragons — aim for bigtent appeal.
“People who are from very different backgrounds and different worlds can all have a shared experience of liking a song,” said
Lesley Wake Webster, the creator of “Perfect Harmony.”
On the other, there’s a clear desire to replicate a hit like “Glee,” which spawned tours, companion shows, album sales. And executives know that a musical number is immediately uploadable, excerptable — a fasttrack to fan engagement and a stealthy way to stretch an advertising budget.
Still, strumming a ukulele doesn’t guarantee going viral, and musical series have an iffy history. When I was growing up, after “The Partridge Family,” before “Glee,” a musical series was mostly a punch line. “Cop Rock,” anyone?
But the success of “Glee,” as well as that of other recent shows like “Nashville” and “Crazy ExGirlfriend,” proved that musical series can thrive.
Which might have suggested that most of these new shows were dreamed up by marketing VPs. But the reality is more complicated and in some cases more personal.
“Perfect Harmony,” a romance between a snooty Princeton professor (Bradley Whitford) and a rube choir, seems like a match made in focus group. But Webster based it on her grandfather, Arthur Wake, a hotshot choir director who spent his final years mentoring singers in rural Kentucky.
Each series has to decide how to assimilate song and story. In “Perfect Harmony,” “Katy Keene” and the “High School Musical” series, the music is mostly diegetic, meaning that it occurs within the story — characters sing because they are in rehearsal or at a karaoke bar. “Soundtrack,” a lip-synced series about a varied group of Los Angelenos, and “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” about a young coder who can hear the innermost thoughts of her fellow San Franciscans via popular song, approach things like Broadway musicals. The music just appears, anywhere, anytime.
But those dance breaks and melismatic runs still need to be earned, so strict rules have been drafted for why and how a show’s characters should sing.
Austin Winsberg, the showrunner for “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” wrote a 27-page manifesto stipulating that each song had to reveal character, drive story or at least make a joke. (Also, jazz hands and kick lines were out.) “Soundtrack,” created by Joshua Safran, the showrunner for the second season of “Smash,” constructed the show’s story around the songs. He built playlists for each character and let the songs, typically four to six per episode, guide the plot.
And yet, as Webster admitted, “Sometimes it’s just like, ‘Gosh, wouldn’t it just be really fun to have them sing right now?’ ”
That said, “fun” wasn’t a word many of the musical showrunners threw around. The breathless pace of episodic television and the added demands of music and dance make for an unforgiving combination.
A song typically requires more takes and more setups than a dialogue scene, and every gesture has to match the backing track. “As somebody who’s done both action and musicals, it is as big as your biggest action sequence,” Safran told me. Which means that it can occasionally feel like a car crash. Kate Reinders, a Broadway performer who stars on “High School Musical,” said, “Sometimes you feel like you never maybe get there.”
Or maybe you get somewhere else. Jane Levy, who stars in “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” said that during a song-anddance number, “It feels like the molecules in the air around us suddenly change.
“It’s just a little bit more joyful, a little bit more connected.”