The Book of Rannells: Girls5eva: Season 1, Episode 4 – “Carma” (2021)

I wouldn’t say that Girls5eva is improving steadily, but this is probably my favorite episode so far. There’s more that I like rather than dislike about it, and of course, I’m glad to see Andrew Rannells featured a lot more here.

Dawn wracks her brain trying to write a new song for the group, while her brother puzzles over Wickie’s relationship with a much younger man. When Gloria expresses concern about Summer’s marriage with Kev, Summer initially blows her off, then starts to worry that her friend might be right.

There’s still some awkwardness in the humor, especially in Dawn’s songwriting attempts. There are places in that plot where the jokes get a little too obvious, although I appreciate that there’s a long sequence in which Dawn is having a vision of Dolly Parton (her songwriting hero, played by Tina Fey) and the show only makes one boob joke. Wickie’s storyline is pretty fun. It plays around with May-December romances and the different ways that can play out with an older man vs. an older woman (even though Wickie would of course never cop to being “old.”)

But the Summer plotline is my favorite, and not just because it’s the one Rannells is in. Before I knew about Rannells’s recurring role on the show, Sara Bareilles and Renée Elise Goldsberry were the actors I was most interested in, but Paula Pell is very quickly emerging as the show’s MVP. She either gets the best lines or just makes the most out of everything she gets, because most of my laugh-out-loud moments come from Gloria. Here, I love her cautionary tale to Summer about how her own long-distance relationship led to her divorce, with the goofy line, “I started self-medicating with spaniels.” And when Summer invites her over for a barbeque/Bible study on Kev’s monthly weekend in town, Gloria explains her attire this way: “Well, I’m short on church merch, so I added ‘J-E’ to an old census shirt.” Solid, sensible Gloria plays well off of Busy Philipps’s right-wing ditz Summer, who absorbed a lot of the sexist messaging she received as a teenage pop star and doesn’t really know how to demand more from an adult relationship.

Speaking of which, let’s talk about Kev. I enjoyed the brief snippets we got from him in episode 2, but he’s much more fun when he’s not actively performing. He quickly establishes himself as someone very shallow, slightly dumb, and pretty conniving—as soon as he gets to town, he preempts Summer’s worries with an offhand excuse that paints him as the victim, throwing in, “The devil is busy!” for good measure. He has plenty of good bits in the episode. I love him reassuring Gloria, “We’re the cool kind of Christians who wear sneakers and compare the Bible to characters from The Office,” and there’s a moment that makes great use of the Law & Order “dun-dun.”

You can tell Rannells is having fun in the role. He and Philipps have very funny chemistry together, and he leans into the absurdity just enough to make it work. I wouldn’t say he’s entirely immune to the show’s lesser jokes—that line about comparing the Bible to Office characters is much funnier than a later, lazier scene that shows him and Summer doing just that—but he plays the part for all it’s worth, and most of the time, it comes off really well.