This has been an interesting week–had the sister’s birthday!-- and next week is supposed to begin with a pizza lunch at work. I need to start writing a bit more, but I have a few things I need to get done first. There are also a few books I need to read.
Also I’m somewhat obsessed with this blog post explaining what a doof Saruman is.
Anyway, we’re going to talk about this series I’ve watched a season of. Not sure what series is next? I’m sort of rewatching both Leverage and Elementary but I think I will maybe pick up something else? Perhaps 10th Kingdom on Roku? Fullmetal Alchemist on Netflix? We shall see.
Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist Season 1 Discussion
This past week I finished season one of Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist and I considered doing this on the review blog, but I’ve only once done a series review there, and I’m unsure if that’s a good idea. And I have two movie reviews coming up for it: Sabrina and Boss Level. So if you follow the Movie Munchies blog, look out for that! But this is going to end up being more of a discussion than a review, as such.
So some time last year YouTube started giving me recommendations for clips from the musical series Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist (henceforth to be referred to as ZEP because I am going to get very tired of typing that out and italicizing it). I decided since I found it for free on Roku that I’d go ahead and check it out.
The premise goeth thusly: Zoey is a programmer at a technology company in San Francisco with a fairly average life, but her dad’s slowly dying from a degenerative neurological disorder. When she complains about headaches, given her family history, her mother recommends she gets that checked out, so she goes and gets an MRI. There’s a freak accident, and Zoey gains a superpower: she is able to get a read on people’s innermost emotions and motivations. The way those emotions reveal themselves? Through musical numbers that only she witnesses.
Yeah, that makes no sense, but you know what? That’s actually a fantastic basis for a musical television series. The whole idea of musicals is that when you feel so strongly you switch from talking to singing, and the idea of using music to express everyday emotions in an average life is a great way to tell a story.
[Not gonna lie, I’m feeling the urge to do fanfic on this. And by that, I mean ‘not really fanfic, but using the same premise with completely unrelated characters and more random musical choices.]
And to be clear, this series is fun. But I’m sort of thinking about this, and I have very little desire to look up season two because while I like the way the story is told, the story itself is not all that compelling, and the musical choices are not all that unique.
Let’s start with the musical choices. For the most part, the songs are pop songs. And I didn’t mind that at first, per se, but the more I think about it, the more I think this could have been more. I’m not a music guy–I don’t know a lot about music, or musicals, or the like–but I think this is a missed opportunity. In the things I do know about music, I know that really powerful musicals, or stories that use powerful soundtracks, use music to develop characters, and a way to do that is to give different characters different types of musical languages.
Hamilton, for instance, gives different characters different styles of singing based on who they are and their background. King George sings differently than Hamilton who sings differently than Burr who sings differently than Jefferson. Likewise, a non-musical like, say, Luke Cage has different kinds of music for different characters’ motifs, like jazz, reggae, hip-hop, and soul.
Now I recognize that ZEP, being a jukebox musical, doesn’t have original songs like that, but in using any music, they could very easily branch out to different genres and build characters’ personalities that way. The songs don’t even necessarily reflect songs the characters themselves know, but how they feel, so it doesn’t even need to be that this character is into this or that genre (although you could also do that). So yeah, you could do pop for scenes expressing common feelings, or feelings a lot of people are expressing because it’s widespread, but individual characters could be doing a specific genre, like country, or hip-hop, or metal, or folk, or indie rock, or whatever.
[To be fair it isn’t all pop music, but the vast majority of it is.]
I kept thinking, when conceptualizing this Note, about Aggretsuko on Netflix–an anime about a young woman who vents about work frustrations through heavy metal karaoke. And yeah, that’s a genre that would lend itself really well to workplace frustration, especially with the problems of that title character–being under-valued, working for a (literal) sexist pig, and seeing people around you with more business success seemingly unwarranted.
I get why they stick with mostly pop music. This is a jukebox musical and in order to appeal to the greatest number of people and get as many people to recognize songs as you can, you pick popular music. But I wish it would be more varied and specific, you know? Even if it is done well.
The second point that pulls me from watching the second season is the actual story. Most of the drama and action of the story is about Zoey’s work and love lives. And the work lives are not even usually about work, but the interpersonal drama between people there (often, their love lives). This is not bad in and of itself, but it isn’t particularly unique or interesting (at least, to me). I get that since they’re going with pop music, they’re basically a good fit for this kind of thing. There are a lot of pop songs about love, unrequited love, broken hearts, and breakups. But okay? So what? We’ve seen these in musicals and television dramas before, it’s just the context of these musical numbers that makes them slightly more interesting. Having Zoey go through another of that most dreaded of pop culture concoctions, the Love Triangle, is not a great way to get me invested in the story, especially since none of it is really resolved by the end of the season.
That being said, there is another major thread going through the season, and that’s Zoey’s family arc. Zoey and her family are dealing with the fact that her dad is dying of PSP (not the handheld system), and that he can’t even communicate with them anymore the way that he used to (except to Zoey through musical numbers). The song choices here for the most part feel more poignant and honest because this is a situation that feels both more unique and more relatable.
But (spoiler alert–I guess? It’s kind of obvious) Mitch dies at the end of the first season. While I don’t think the series would throw away everything with that storyline, it’s not encouraging for me, who had this as the emotional highlight of the series. This is what stuck out to me as a storyline, and it’s gone. Which it kind of had to be, the way it was written, so it’s not a surprise or a disappointment, but I don’t have much reason to stick around.
I don’t know. I had fun, a lot of it, but it didn’t really glow for me. About halfway through I wasn’t feeling this series as much. Maybe I’ll look into the second season at some point, but there’s no rush. At the very least I expect I’ll probably look up some musical numbers. If you really like jukebox musicals you may consider checking it out, but it’s not a must-watch by any stretch.
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