I was hoping to get through the rest of Girls5eva’s second season and put together my last Book of Rannells write-ups for the time being, but I’ve hit a snag. While season 1 dropped all at once, season 2 only released the first three episodes to start with, and now it’s coming out week to week. We’ll see, gradually, how many more episodes Andrew Rannells is in.
Now that she and Kev are getting divorced, Summer is tentatively starting to make a new path for herself, but all that is thrown out of whack when her traveling-evangelist parents come to town. Since Kev didn’t turn out to be the one, her dad explains, they expect her to go back to being abstinent until she finds “the two” and remarries. Dawn stresses over the pressure of writing a love song for the new album, but Wickie doesn’t think her method of destressing is very healthy.
I think the Dawn plot is just okay. There are parts of it I like, especially the contrast between her and Wickie. The crux of Wickie’s issue relates to Dawn’s “boring” home life married to “a normal,” as opposed to Wickie’s clout-chasing hookups—this week, she’s humble-bragging about the NDA she had to sign about her relationship with her new NBA beau, who she approvingly confides is “7 foot redacted.” But a major part of the storyline hinges on a show Dawn and her husband are obsessed with, and while I get the “these hit shows are all the same” jokes, the details of the show and discussion therein are too generic to feel like a real series. It’s called Business Throne and presumably has Succession vibes, but it’s about the drama within a family running a company called “Fam Co.,” and characters speculating about upcoming episodes have lines like, “Do you think the son who always goes rogue is gonna go rogue?” Again, I get it, but it’s generic.
Over in the Summer storyline, her parents are played by none other than Amy Sedaris (Princes Carolyn!) and Neil Flynn (who I’ll always remember best as the Janitor on Scrubs.) It’s a bit of an obvious plot and pokes a lot of fun at evangelicals, but Sedaris and Flynn are pretty entertaining, playing well off of each other and off of Busy Philipps. I do like the ongoing exploration of the fact that Summer was a hypersexualized teenage popstar who simultaneously built a brand based on being a conservative Christian, which is a definite type. It’s understandable that Summer wore her dad’s purity ring before she married Kev, and it’s also very understandable why she’d have reservations about doing the same thing now as a grown-ass woman, even as she’s still not used to going against the impression her parents have of her.
Line of the episode goes to, who else—Gloria! She disapproves of the whole purity ring idea and urges Dawn and Wickie to help her talk Summer out of it. At one point, anxious to dissuade Summer by awakening her sexual urges, Gloria pulls up a “sexy” picture on her phone to show Summer and says, “What about Kevin Costner doing ranch stuff?” Hee!
When I saw that there was a big Summer-centric plot, I was wondering if Kev would show up, but shortly after her parents arrive, Summer explains that he’s on a trip with their daughter out of state. The show still manages to sneak in a quick Andrew Rannells cameo, though, with a short clip of their early-2000s abstinence love duet “Can’t Wait 2 Wait.” I don’t know if I buy this as something Summer and Kev would’ve collaborated on during Girls5eva’s heyday, but as someone who grew up on Christian rock and pop music, I can 100% vouch for the existence of actual songs like this. Rannells and Philipps have fun hamming it up here.
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