30 Rock,Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,Great News,Mr. Mayor, and now,Girls5eva. The “Tina Fey-produced TV sitcom” has become an assembly line piece of formula constructed of specifics-crammed jokes and out-of-their-element protagonists trying to stay grounded and professional in an outlandish, borderline cartoonish world. This ain’t exactly intended as a dig — I love most of these shows and am especially grateful for Fey’s focus on joke density in the comedy form. It’s just the inadvertently ubiquitous framing present throughout my consumption of the first five episodes of Peacock’sGirls5eva, executive produced by Fey and created by regular collaboratorMeredith Scardino. It’s impossible not to compare it to these other Fey shows — not just because of how in lockstep it is with many facets of them, but because of its varying attempts to break the mold, in a varied spectrum of success.
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In what might be the last golden era of mass culture pop music — think late ‘90s/early 2000s,Britney SpearsandBackstreet Boys— a girl group scores a hit before disbanding. Now in the present day, four of the remaining members —Sara Bareilles,Renée Elise Goldsberry,Paula Pell, andBusy Philipps— find a surprising path to reunion and success, but must balance the pressures and perils of pop stardom with the oft-fraught transitions into adulthood the women have since taken. Oh, and throughout all of it, there’s like 900 jokes per minute, which is mostly great!
The MVPs at delivering this style of comedy are clearly, revelatorially, Goldsberry and Philipps. Goldsberry, whose Wickie is trying desperately to cling to the image of a fierce, entrepreneurial, powerful woman (like ifBeyoncé’s Instagram was full of spon-con), fills her frames with a commanding combo of delusion and vulnerability, spitting out her absolute mouthfuls of bonkers jokes with the utmost conviction and power. And Philipps, as our (I say this with love!) dummy member who clings to the past like a dayglo-colored life raft, is simply perfect. She is relentlessly funny, surprisingly layered, and constantly making stunningly screwball choices.
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). And sadly, Bareilles does not work in this playground for me;while I adored her songwriting work on fellow TV musical comedyCentral Park, I find her disappearing into the margins of her own story. 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. 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.
But she’s not solely to blame for the feelings of inconsistency. LikeKimmy Schmidtbefore it,Girls5evatakes advantage of its streaming platform to take however the heck long it wants per episode. 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. This is wholly, and consistently, to the show’s detriment. 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. No darlings have been killed in the editing of the show, making the show less darling overall. The overall filmmaking is one area I wish stuck more stringently to that Fey assembly-line approach.
But the show’s scripts also put one foot off the factory conveyor belt. 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). You’ll also get some of the sour, strange obsessions with crass jokes about identity thatseem 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).
More promisingly are the show’s unprecedented flirtations with emotional explorations, retained continuity, and challenging of status quos. 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. I was impressed and pleased with some of the sensitivity and scope of what’s explored with these characters, both related to the focus of character growth (Episode 3 featuring a particularly lovely, unpredictable realization from Bareilles) and satirical comedy (the tunes in this show are routinely wonderful, and acerbic in their demolishing of the toxic patriarchy such styles of music are often produced by). IfGirls5evakeeps stepping in this direction while retaining what works about the past — and gets its filmmaking shit together — it could really be onto something lovely and special.
LikeJackson MaineandJon Batistereminded us, there are only 12 notes in the construction of music. And pop music’s pleasures come in large part from the mastery of and play with these previously established notes and formulas.Girls5eva, just like its characters, does its best to give us the monster hooks we’re used to while poking at the boxes constraining said hooks, coming up with a somewhat mixed but somewhat appealing result. LessTaylor Swift’severmore, more Taylor Swift’sReputation.
Girls5evadebuts on Peacock June 15, 2025.
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