by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

In January of 2015, a new musical show came to take the throne! Galavant premiered as a new spin on the genre—this time, a medieval musical with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Glenn Slater. It was intended as a four-week musical extravaganza, covering Once Upon a Time’s time slot for January. And for that month, viewers were treated to a silly, goofy good time.

Galavant follows the titular Galavant (Joshua Sasse), a down-on-his-luck knight, who is convinced by Sid (Luke Youngblood), his squire, and Isabella (Karen David), a princess from another kingdom, to go and try to save his beloved from King Richard (Timothy Omundson). Over the course of the season, we learn about Galavant’s past relationship with Madalena (Mallory Jansen), Richard’s current wife, and how Isabella’s story ties in with the king’s. We also see King Richard’s pathetic wife-guy behavior, which is a fun twist for the show to throw in.

With fun cameos, clever songs, interesting twists, and a quick runtime to keep things moving, Galavant was a delight. Though heavily rumored to get canceled after the first season, ABC renewed the show for another season. The second season’s first episode was titled “A New Season aka Suck It Cancellation Bear,” to poke fun at the cancellation speculation.

Unfortunately, the show was canceled after that season, though Galavant had a nice little run. The world just wasn’t ready for this goofy of a musical tv show yet…or ever? (We’ll discuss this more later.) It’s notable that the shows that hit it big, let’s say, were the ones that went for an exaggerated, soap opera sort of storytelling versus going fantastical or historical. Viewers were down for the soap opera vibes but getting them to commit to something more involved was a step too far.

Alan Menken has talked about wanting to do more within the world (a common refrain after cancellations like this, especially for musical shows). Likewise, Kenny Ortega talked about his desire to create more Julie and the Phantoms, and Cinco Paul has many songs already written for the axed season 3 of Schmigadoon. We’ll talk about both shows later this year!

Also, I simply have to point out how deeply weird Dan Fogelman’s career is. He wrote several Disney flicks, including Tangled (where he met Menken and Slater), Cars, and Bolt (if you remember the Miley Cyrus dog movie at all). He also wrote the iconic and weird Crazy, Stupid Love and the much-mocked Life Itself.

He created several tv shows, one of which, in my opinion, is the best of his career. And it ain’t This Is Us. It’s Pitch, a show I could talk about forever, but I’ll try to spare you here. I’ll simply say, check out Emily Maesar’s piece on the show.

On the whole, Galavant is a great example of a musical tv show where all the right ingredients were there, but like many shows before or since, it couldn’t find their audience. In a different time (but not ours), it could’ve run for a few seasons on lower ratings and maybe found success. But we simply don’t let that happen anymore. Probably the last time that happened was Schitt’s Creek, but it seems no one learned their lesson.

This show serves as a good counter for next month’s topic: Empire, which ran for six seasons, up through 2019. That show is an excellent example of how we went from the old TV model to streaming, as the ratings went from an astronomical 17 million viewers for the season 1 finale to as low as 4 million for the final season. More on that next month!

Until then, I’ll leave you with this ditty: