Review: Pop Music is Not for Straight Men!
‘Girls5eva’ Season 3 is just so stupid (endorsement)
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰✰✰
Romance: ✰✰✰
Sex: ✰
Storytelling: ✰✰✰✰
Performance: ✰✰✰✰✰
Yearning: ✰✰✰
If you like this post, we’ll love you 5ever <3
Light spoilers ahead!
Written by Ali Romig
Ever since Meredith Scardino’s Girls5eva premiered on Peacock back in 2021, I have been absolutely begging my peers to give it some love (with little success). The fact that it was on a relatively overlooked platform and received almost no marketing didn’t help things. Criminally underserved, Girls5eva was eventually canceled by Peacock after its second season…but then the Netflix gods (ie. Executive Producer Tina Fey’s friends, probably) smiled on this little gem. In a meta-twist, Girls5eva’s second chance was given a second chance.
Whether you come to this show for its toxic 90s-pop nostalgia or because you harbored an adolescent lesbian crush on Sara Bareilles, its absolutely stupid-silly humor is what will get you to hang around. For those unfamiliar, the show revolves around the four surviving members of a one hit wonder 90s girl group, Girls5eva (their fifth member, Ashley, died in an infinity pool accident). When their song is sampled by a hot young artist 30 years later, the now-middle-aged performers decide to use the exposure to launch a comeback nobody’s asking for, all while juggling their adult lives. Dawn (Bareilles) is now a wife and mother; Gloria (Paula Pell) runs a successful dental practice; Summer (Busy Phillips) is unhappily married to fellow 90s pop star Kev (Andrew Rannells); and Wickie (Renée Elise Goldsberry) is just doing her best to maintain a glamorous facade.
Season 3 of the show picks up right where things left off in Season 2, with the group embracing “tour mode” after completing their new album, Returnity. Unfortunately, their time on the road is less tour and more residency, as they languish in Fort Worth at the one bar that will book them after their song “Step Into Your Fort Worth” becomes somewhat of an anthem with patrons. Ever the pusher, Wickie eventually rallies the girls to move on from Texas. Unfortunately, she does so by putting them in financial peril, using all their money to book a Thanksgiving show at Radio City Music Hall. The rest of the season follows Girls5eva as they travel throughout the country trying to drum up enough interest in their gig to get them off the hook for the deposit.
Girls5eva is truly a joke-a-minute sitcom. I mean seriously, the sheer number of gags and side-bits stuffed into every episode is mind-boggling. It’s also extremely referential, calling back to both widely-known and obscure IRL pop-culture moments. There’s something undeniably queer about this—pop music has always belonged to the gays, so pulling from it’s history for comedic fodder makes it feel like the show is speaking our language. The breakneck pace also means that you have to be ready to pay attention when you watch, or you may miss an easter egg. This might sound tiresome, but it doesn’t play that way. The show flows smoothly, working its jokes into the narrative effortlessly without ever skipping a beat. And because the show revolves around a music group, its best jokes are often sung. My favorite musical moment from this season? It’s a toss-up between the Clean Kidz Club’s version of N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police” (“Ducks Are Mean Geese”), or Summer inappropriately scatting on folk singer Pixie Jones’ single “What if the World was Round?” (which is an incredible nod to this iconically unhinged Jessica Simpson moment).
The writing on this show is sharp, but I truly don’t think it’d work half as well without its core cast. Season 3 excels at giving each of the four “Girls” satisfying and comically meaty arcs. In previous seasons, Bareilles was meant to be the “straight man” to the others’ more obviously off-the-walls characters, but this season she’s given freedom to play and really lean into Dawn’s own brand of absurdity. It’s fun and endearing to see the often-earnest Bareilles really go for the jokes and land them! Busy Phillips’ Summer also takes up more space this season, having outgrown the fairly one-note “dumb blonde” material she was given in early episodes. Newly separated from Kev, Summer is trying to figure out who she really is—which leads her to burn her entire wardrobe, make clothes from scratch using curtains and loofahs, and eventually work for someone known as “the exalted Kyle” selling teeth-whitening gummies. Phillips still delivers most of her lines in a breathy lilt, but I was truly impressed by the sheer amount of plot she carried.
Paula Pell is slept on, in my humble opinion. Best known for her work as an SNL writer from 1995 to 2020, she holds her own performance-wise as Gloria, and often steals the scene. This season, after separating from her wife Caroline (played by Pell’s IRL wife Janine Brito), Gloria is on a quest to sleep with “every type of woman” to ensure that Caroline is the one for her. She creates an elaborate spreadsheet detailing the various types, including the ever-elusive “cigar mommy”. She also reaches out directly to her community at every stop on their tour via an app called Bumpr, where she’s branded herself “Ho Spice” (just never write it down, because it looks like hospice). After years of writing some of the most iconic sketches for other people on SNL, it just makes me happy to see Pell be so funny and so gay as a lead in a sitcom. Quite honestly, Girls5eva is just pure, frothy fun, but to get to have campy humor—sapphic camp, even!—represented authentically in a fairly mainstream comedy feels special.
But while I love Pell’s Gloria, no one on this show has surprised and delighted me more than Renée Elise Goldsberry as Wickie Roy (real name Lesley Wiggins), whose comedic timing and delivery should be studied in labs. I guess because I always saw her as a star of the Great Broad Way, I didn’t know what to expect from her on a sitcom. But if there is one reason to give this show a chance, it’s Goldsberry. She is a queen of the one-liner, delivering such gems as “I haven’t received this much applause since I agreed to get off an airplane” and “I have a hot doorknob for him” (a sexually inappropriate reference to Home Alone) with such disarming precision, I don’t even know how to accurately praise her. Just trust me on this one.
Rounding out the stellar performances are guest spots by some familiar faces, like a Fetal Citizen Advocate played by John Early, who objects to the girls’ song B.P.E (Big Pussy Energy), and Catherine Cohen as Taffy England, a sugar-baby who grew up internalizing Girls5eva’s problematic lyrics. The show is mostly still the one we know and love from Peacock, with a few Netflix-esque tweaks (they curse more and can be slightly more risqué with plot lines). Honestly, if I had one complaint, it’s that the season is entirely too short. With only six 20-minute episodes, I felt like everything wrapped up just as I was really getting hooked. But at least it makes for effortless viewing—I was able to finish it in one sitting. (Don’t judge me! It’s literally less than three hours of television, OK???). So basically…you have no excuse not to give it a try!
All three seasons of Girls5eva are now available to stream on Netflix!
The Elephant in the Werkroom
Episode 13:
I typically either love the makeover challenges (season 9’s crew makeovers, season 12’s super fans makeovers) or hate them (season 8…), but this season’s makeover made me feel a little meh.
The good? Because they were making over Ru’s Las Vegas dancers, they killed the challenge performance and understood the assignment.
The bad? It was a lot of the same in terms of hiccups. Most of those getting makeovers were “too broad” or had “too much facial hair” so narratively, it felt like a little derivative.
Did anyone else think Plane was being set up for the win when Ru laughed for precisely 45-minutes after she introduced her drag daughter as “Lazy Susan”?
In the end, Plane does take the win and Sapphira ends up in the bottom for the first time. While we’ve seen a lot of lip sync upsets this season, I knew we wouldn’t be getting one this time. Sapphira has earned her spot in the top four.
And here we are, with a final four of Plane Jane, Q, Sapphira, and Nymphia Wind. Just as we all predicted so many weeks ago :)
Wait okay I wanna watch this