by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

In 2021, Girls5Eva hit Peacock. From Meredith Scardino and Tina Fey, the team behind Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Girls5Eva followed the members of a pop girl group that had outlived their one-hit wonder status. The music was composed by Jeff Richmond (Tina Fey’s husband) with lyrics by Meredith Scardino, though Sara Barielles contributed a couple songs as well. Now that my exploration of musical television has entered the streaming era, Girls5Eva serves as a reminder of just how chaotic television has gotten.

The group Girls5Eva consisted of Dawn (Sara Bareilles), Summer (Busy Phillips), Gloria (Paula Pell), Wickie (Renée Elise Goldsberry), and Ashley (Ashley Park), who died in a tragic infinity pool accident, though the show does toy with the idea that she’s not really dead. The group was famous in the nineties, but they’ve all moved on in their adult lives. Their one hit (“Famous5Eva,” which also serves as the theme song for the show) is sampled by a rapper, which brings some attention back to the group.

Unhappy in their current day to day, the four members decide to bring back Girls5Eva, and hijinks ensue. Pretty typical storylines about performers follow: Dawn, the songwriter, faces writer’s block, so the gang goes to a cabin to write. Summer confronts her husband, a presumably gay boyband member, about his secret life, but it’s not what you think! The gals perform at a Pride event and must contend with their irrelevance.

This show has a lot to say about the music landscape and celebrity culture, but it’s not all that revolutionary. When the third season aired, I saw a lot of people talking about how funny it is, but the first season wasn’t all that laugh-out-loud funny. At most, I had a couple chuckles. But there are things to like about this show: its focus on women, especially women in their forties, who often don’t get to be the main characters in shows like this one; the deepening bond between these women; and Renée Elise Goldsberry’s performance, especially, is great.

Over the course of the first season, we see some of the band’s other songs, and we can understand why they only had one hit. But as Dawn writes songs for the group, they’re not all hits either. By the end of the season, Dawn’s song “4 Stars” is a song I could see hitting number one in minivans across the country. It’s a Mom Song, which is undeniably an important part of the music landscape.

From a macro-level, I think this show is a good example of the trajectory for musical shows now, especially in the production side of things. The first season hit Peacock in May 2021, with a second season coming out a year later. In 2022, Peacock canceled the show, and Netflix picked it up for a third season, which came out earlier this year. I’m assuming that season three will be the final one, given how Netflix operates and that the show didn’t make a big splash. As far as I can tell, there hasn’t been an official cancellation from Netflix, but given how long they waited to cancel Julie and the Phantoms, who knows when they might announce it.

I know fans of the show had hoped that Girls5Eva would get a bump from the move to Netflix. In the 2010s, it was relatively common for a show to get more popular after arriving on the platform. Famously, Breaking Bad and Schitt’s Creek had wild responses. For an even more unbelievable example, You was canceled by Lifetime after its first season in 2018, and its final season for Netflix finished filming earlier this month. Michael Schneider at Variety says that the title could have been holding the show back from reaching viewers, but unfortunately, I think it’s just way less likely for something like this to happen these days.

There are so many shows that come and go, and unless you have your finger on the pulse, you’ll miss the release of new shows, and by the time you tune in, it’s been canceled. This is just how streaming is now. Shows get canceled quickly after premiering, or they wait in a wasteland, hoping to get picked up again after months of speculation. I’m not sure which fate is more painful.

Overall, Girls5Eva is a great example of a show taking a fun premise and delivering some laughs and fun music with it. But because of how our current media landscape works, it never really had a chance to find its footing. Unfortunately, this will be an ongoing theme for the next couple months, as I’ll be writing about Schmigadoon and Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies, which were both victims of streaming nonsense as well.