*A couple season premise spoilers.*
Sure enough, Andrew Rannells is in the newly-dropped season 2 of Girls5eva! Not sure how many episodes he’s in—I’m avoiding his IMDb until I finish making my way through the season, so I can be surprised whenever he pops up.
As indicated by the episode title, Girls5eva is back in the studio, cutting their first new album in over 20 years. As they try to get in the zone and lay down demos, distractions begin to crop up. Dawn feels threatened by the songwriting talent of their studio engineer, an encounter with the paparazzi doesn’t go as Wickie planned, and Summer has a hard time getting Kev on board with announcing their impending divorce.
Season 2 so far feels like an improvement over season 1—I’d put the show in good-not-great territory, although it admittedly suffers in comparison to We Are Lady Parts, another Peacock about an all-female music group that I’ve been watching lately. Now that Girls5eva is on a solid comeback path, the storylines have more direction, and a lot of the jokes feel more purposeful.
In this episode, Wickie is completely on point. I love her debate over whether to witheringly call the paparazzi animals or tell them, “You killed Diana” (as she shamelessly angles for them to photograph her, of course.) She also has a “riff rolodex” of all her classic vocal runs, a fun recurring gag that gets some good mileage. And Gloria, as usual, gets my vote for line of the episode. Here, it’s in reference to Dawn’s concerns about their engineer: “Did I miss something? Did he take his dick out? Not that I would notice. They are so boring to me.”
Meanwhile, Dawn has been hitting her groove as the group’s main songwriter, even though she’s still prone to some implausibly-comedic missteps—her big opus in this episode boasts the use of all 400-something definitions of the word “set.” As such, it’s understandable that she goes on the defensive when she runs into someone who seems to effortlessly improve on her work. It’s a nice plot for her, amusing but rooted in character.
As expected, Andrew Rannells is over in the Summer plotline. By the end of last season, they were edging towards divorce, but now that they’re on the brink of announcing it, Kev is struggling to pull the trigger. A big part of the issue is that they’ve built their brand on being the early-2000s royal couple of pop music. Kev isn’t all that interested in being Summer’s husband anymore, but he still wants the perks of being “Summer and Kev.”
It doesn’t specifically come up in this episode, but another issue at play here is that the show has been intimating that Kev is probably gay (a characterization that they haven’t really been playing for cheap laughs, so that’s a plus.) While times are changing, that’s still a tricky spot for a former boy-band heartthrob to be in, made tougher by how instrumental Kev’s Christian identity is to his image. The show only touched on this notion lightly last season, so we’ll see if it gets any more play here.
Personally, I think the humor is a little rougher in this plot, relying more on easy jokes and trite characterizations. Kev’s attempts to wuss out of announcing the divorce are transparent, and I think his “hip” speech has been cranked up a few notches since last season, peppering his dialogue with lines like, “Your love and light have been totes noted.” Still, Rannells’s commitment and delivery makes it mostly work. When he aborts one divorce announcement with an impromptu house tour on Instagram Live, I laughed at loud at his exclamation of, “Aw, look at this, it’s a hallway, dawg!” Also, apropos of absolutely nothing, he manages to describe FDR as “that president with the leg blanket and his shorty.”
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