The Book of Rannells: Girls5eva: Season 3, Episode 2 – “Bomont” (2024)

*Season 3 premise spoilers.*

Girls5eva has moved to Netflix now, which is convenient for me (although I will be picking up Peacock again later this month—season 2 of We Are Lady Parts is finally coming!!!) This season marks a new chapter in Girls5eva’s revival, and this episode is an entertaining one.

This season, Girls5eva is attempting to get a tour off the ground, and their next concert is in Bomont (yes, the town from Footloose.) Gloria is dismayed at the thought of being stuck in a “boob desert” with no other queer women, while Dawn feuds with a state senator over intrusive reproductive laws. And Summer attempts to figure out who she is apart from the men in her life.

Gloria’s plot is okay. She loves encountering other queer women on the tour, for both the groupie possibilities and the affirming anthem she performs onstage. But the prospect of being somewhere without that community bums her out, and her hookup app shows an absolute dearth of lesbians. She spirals a bit and tries to throw herself into distractions to cope.

Dawn’s storyline is more interesting. She found out she was pregnant just before the tour started, and she’s now far enough along to learn the sex of the baby. That’s where she encounters the state senator, who serves as a mandated “fetal advocate” at the OBGYN’s office. “I’m just here to give a voice to the voiceless,” he explains, adding for the fetus, “‘Keep me safe, Mama!’” While the depiction is over-the-top in kind of a hammy way, it’s a decent commentary on life for pregnant people in red states post-Roe. And I really like seeing the normally conflict-avoidant Dawn trying to figure out how to stand up to the senator, especially when doing so might threaten their tour—three guesses as to how a Mike Pence-ish state senator would react to a girl group singing about “Big Pussy Energy” in his town.

Oh yeah, and we get the line, “I declare a Footloose!”, which is great.

Summer’s plot kicks off when Dawn discovers that she still calls Kev to approve her outfits, even though they’re divorced. She follows Dawn’s advice to cut ties with him but immediately gloms onto a new “love of her life” to model her personality and aesthetic around. The storyline is over-the-top and goofy, but it ultimately comes to her realizing that she’s always defined herself in relation to men and needs to figure out who she really is.

Andrew Rannells appears at the start of this storyline in a quick Facetime cameo where he gives Summer a fit check. I laughed at him enthusiastically describing Summer’s outfit as looking “like Easter Bunny’s trophy wife!” And when Dawn bursts in and realizes what’s going on, Summer tells Kev to put on some “hold music” while she and Dawn talk—he blithely approves, humming happily to himself. Hee!

According to IMDb, this is Rannells’s only appearance this season, which tracks. If Summer is intentionally breaking away from Kev, it makes sense that he wouldn’t have much of a presence on the show anymore.

Rannells has been in a few movies recently, but none of them are on streaming yet. In that case, it’s time to pivot back to Tony Leung Chiu-wai for my weekly actor reviews. I’ll be diving into another one of his TV series from the ‘80s, The New Heaven Sword and Dragon Sabre!

The Book of Rannells: Girls5eva: Season 2, Episode 8 – “Tour Mode” (2022)

*A couple spoilers that will be too difficult to talk around.*

Here we are at the season finale. Pretty fun, although there are places where the narrative or the humor gets strained. On the whole, I’d say I’ve come around to finding Girls5eva entertaining enough that I might watch it with or without Andrew Rannells. But having Rannells around is a definite plus!

Girls5eva is up for a chance to tour with Collab, the boy band their label is putting all their energy and resources into. Though everyone is excited about the prospect of touring, even as an opener, each has their own reasons for feeling conflicted. Wickie has caught feelings for the “lunch lord.” Gloria is nervous about leaving her ex-wife so soon after getting back together. Summer’s worried that Kev isn’t equipped to look after their daughter on his own. And Dawn just found out she’s pregnant.

The Dawn stuff is the plot I found kind of trite in the last episode, and I’m still not thrilled about it, but I think the show goes to more interesting places with it here. In addition to being unsure and keeping the pregnancy a secret from the rest of the group, she’s also demoralized by everything she’s being told about having a “geriatric pregnancy.” We look at the mix between medical fact and sexism/ageism, and there’s a really delightful scene with an OBGYN in the middle of the episode.

Wickie’s plot continues to be fun. The dynamic between her and Sheawn the lunch lord is great; Renée Elise Goldsberry is superb at tossing out lines like, “I think you and I could maybe work because Sandra Bullock’s with a children’s birthday photographer.” And it’s interesting to watch her spiral over 1) realizing she’s actually starting to care about someone else and 2) being unsure how she can square that with her career dreams. (Side note: Last week, I kept trying to remember what I knew Sheawn from. I looked it up, and he’s played by Chad L. Coleman, who was on The Wire.)

At first, I thought this might be another cameo-only episode for Andrew Rannells, but, as per the episode summary, Kev is pretty involved in Summer’s plot. Both of them are psyched at the thought of their influencer daughter being accepted into a hype house, and while it initially seems like Kev is being the Extremely Online version of a supportive dad, it turns out he just doesn’t want to have the full-time parental duties if Summer goes on tour.

Best exchange of the episode? Kev frantically insists, “I am not going to be a single dad. I’ve only ever been a weekend dad! What do you do on a Wednesday? Is that when she eats?” To which Summer snaps, “She eats all the days!!” There’s also a funny bit involving Kev’s reaction to using the F-word in a fit of emotion. A lot of the material on this show ranges from “all right” to “pretty good,” but the talent actors like Rannells, Busy Philipps, and the rest of the cast elevate it.

As a parting note, I do really like how the season finale wraps up. It leaves me intrigued about what’s in store for the girls next.

Girls5eva: Season 2, Episode 7 – “Returnity” (2022)

And Andrew Rannells is back! The penultimate episode of the season is a little scattered. It feels like there’s maybe one too many plots going on, and not all of them are well-defined enough to anchor their part of the story.

Girls5eva have finished recording their new album, but the high quickly falls as they realize their label doesn’t have much interest in promoting it. Wickie latches on to a “normal” that she decides is a one-man focus group and pumps him for advice on how to create their own traction on the album. Dawn isn’t feeling well and is convinced something’s wrong, while those around her figure it’s either stress or her hypochondria kicking in. Elsewhere, Gloria and her recently-reunited ex-wife are looking for a new place, but Kev (who’s an aspiring realtor on the side) thinks Gloria’s less committed to the reunion than she professes.

As you can see, there’s a lot going on there. I enjoy Wickie’s plot pretty well. Her opportunistic dealings with her one-man focus group, a friend and colleague of Dawn’s husband, is a lot of fun. He’s a “lunch lord” (which he insists is the male term for “lunch lady,”) and there are some amusing cafeteria-food jokes thrown into the mix. And I like the contrast between Wickie’s drama/shallowness and his “basic” sensibilities, which put him in touch with the common man. At one point, Wickie breathlessly says, “Wow. You’re like if Anaheim was a person.”

That Dawn plot feels like of tacked-on and not super original. The stuff with the label is amusing, especially when their point person shows them the finished album. So reflective of the direction of the industry—“It’s just for show. Everything is digital now, but I wanted you to have something to hold.” Meanwhile, the Gloria plot feels kind of forced. She’s been all in on missing her ex pretty much since day one, and while it’s not unrealistic that actually getting back together with her couldn’t match the fantasy she’d built up in her head, the show didn’t really lay any groundwork for the storyline before this episode.

But even if I’m not crazy about Gloria’s storyline, Andrew Rannells is a lot of fun in it. Kev is doing his best to hustle as a “celebrity realtor,” but he’s put a lot more effort into the pizzazz part of job than actually understanding real estate. He measures floor plans in boy-band dance moves and sings inaccurate snippets from popular songs, explaining, “It’s not the original tune, so I don’t have to pay anyone.” And Rannells and Paula Pell have always played well off of each other. The conceit here is that Kev recognizes his own relationship with Summer in Gloria’s and thus realizes she’s not as all-in as she professes. My favorite line comes when Gloria snaps, “I love her, and I am not pretending to be happy!”, and Kev replies, “That’s a direct quote from my wedding vows.” Rannells’s delivery is so low-key but simultaneously pitch perfect—he has such good command over when to go over-the-top vs. understated.

The Book of Rannells: Girls5eva: Season 2, Episode 4 – “Can’t Wait 2 Wait” (2022)

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.