It has become a classic television trope: out of boredom, or inspiration, or celebration, television creators are occasionally overpowered with the urge to break out the big production number and turn a normally prosaic show into a song and dance extravaganza.
Most recently, How I Met Your Mother celebrated its 100th episode with a rousing production number, “Nothing Suits Me Like a Suit.” But the phenomenon has been building for years, with decidedly mixed results. I was curious to see how successful (or painful) various television shows have been at attempting to be tuneful. I have differing levels of familiarity with the source materials, but I tried to wade in with an open mind, a song in my heart, and a spring in my step.
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SCRUBS
Episode 6.06, “My Musical”
I watched Scrubs more or less regularly until the late sixth season, when I gave it up; feeling like the show had run its course and was simply treading water. “My Musical,” then, for me, felt like the last gasp of a once-enjoyable show. In a reality that had often included musical interludes, dream sequences, and fantastical twists, a complete musical felt like the next logical step. The impetus for the episode is a patient with a serious aneurysm, whose main symptom is to imagine everyone singing and dancing.
They manage to squeeze a high number of original, toe-tapping songs into the limited running time. Several of the songs are obvious send-ups of specific Broadway standards; “Friends Forever” is a close mirror to Grease’s “We Go Together,” “The Rant Song” is a variation on Pirates of Penzance’s “Modern Major General,” and so on.
The actors all do capable jobs as singers, with the few less-talented ones relegated to a few stray lines. But the choreography is actually excellent, and the cast throws themselves into the silliness with aplomb. Below you can see one of the standout moments, where Turk and J.D. explain the primary source for all diagnoses:
GRADE: A-
XENA: WARRIOR PRINCESS
Episodes 3.12 & 5.10, “The Bitter Suite” and “Lyre, Lyre, Hearts on Fire”
I have never before seen an episode of Xena. I only knew that it was a spin-off of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and was famous for being campy and vaguely homoerotic. I was therefore unprepared for the myriad levels of insanity that the show embraced: the gravity-defying flips, unintelligible accents, baffling special effects, melodramatic music cues, magic, midriffs, personified Gods, centaurs, and fringe bangs that make up this mystifying mess of a show. I think I may have secretly loved it a little.
The first musical episode, “The Bitter Suite,” takes place almost entirely in a dream world called Illusia. Xena and her friend, Gabrielle, have had a serious falling-out. They decide to kill one another, fall of a cliff, and wake up in a strange cross between Alice Through the Looking Glass and Disneyland. They are serenaded by various friends and foes, both past and present, as they learn that they have to overcome their anger and forgive one another if they are going to return to their regular lives.
Cursory research shows that Lucy Lawless, as Xena, sang her own songs, while Gabrielle was dubbed. Lawless actually has an astonishingly rich voice, emotive and sad. I wasn’t able to tell if the other main characters were dubbed or not, but the characters of Joxer, Callisto and Ares (yes, the God) all had professional-grade voices. Between the whackadoodle sets and costumes and the surprisingly good vocals, I was really enjoying this episode.
Unfortunately, it lost steam in the second half, and by the end, it was little more than drawn-out apologies being sung at full voice. Still, I had to give credit for the fact that they used original songs, and used them well, to advance the plot and give insight to the characters.
The second musical episode, “Lyre, Lyre, Hearts on Fire” happened a couple of years later and took itself far less seriously. Instead of original songs, this time they used variations of classic pop and Broadway tunes, and while there was a nominal excuse for all the singing (a battle of the bands, and no, I’m not kidding) it didn’t quite explain why people were bursting into music on the streets. On the whole, it was more nonsensical and silly.
With all that said, however, the cast throws themselves into it with admirable enthusiasm. A heavily pregnant Lawless looks like she should be on bed rest, or at the very least waddling and clutching her lower back, but she sings and dances and prances with abandon. A scene in a bathhouse where Xena defends her right to raise her child on her own which turns into a rendition of “Sisters Are Doin’ It For Themselves” is actually quite rousing and fun:
Still, no amount of enthusiasm can quite make up for the fact that the episode ends with a rap-off.
GRADE: “The Bitter Suite”: B+, “Lyre, Lyre, Hearts on Fire”: C+
DARIA
Episode 3.01, “Daria!”
I had seen a dozen or so episodes of Daria prior to this project, so I was pretty familiar with the premise: a world-weary, heavily ironic self-isolationist hates the shallow teens at her high school and distances herself from her middle-class family.
Attempting a musical in the hyper-reality of the show isn’t too far-fetched. It benefits from having professional voice actors, who even when they have deliberately annoying voices (like Daria’s sister, or the enemy cheerleader) will still hit all the notes confidently. The premise is slight to the point of being almost non-existent: there’s a big storm, and Daria and Jane get trapped on the roof with the enemy cheerleader and Quarterback.
Character reveals are minimal, but the story is consistently amusing. There’s a notably funny moment when Daria’s father begins what seems like a very sweet love song to his wife, which is cut off after two lines as he considers other obligations. You can see that one, along with clips of the other songs, in this video:
Overall, the episode is entertaining, if not particularly ambitious.
GRADE: B
7TH HEAVEN
Episode 9.15, “Red Socks”
This is another show where I went in blind, only knowing that it was about a preacher’s family and that it ran for an exceptionally long time (11 seasons, apparently). I hadn’t ever been interested in seeing it, but I would have guessed that a sweet, family–centric drama would have been an apt vehicle for a musical episode.
I would have been wrong.
It is unfathomable to me that this episode was ever conceived, written, or executed without someone, somewhere, putting on the brakes. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a more unwatchable hour of television. The singing wavered somewhere between passable and terrible, and the dancing was mostly swooping and shimmying. They used pop songs instead of original songs, but the ones they chose only had the most tenuous connection to the emotions supposedly being expressed.
If you don’t believe how bad it could get, check out the version of “You Were Meant for Me.” The awfulness starts at 2:30.
Beyond the humiliating attempts at music, though, the main plot and dialogue were atrocious. The characters came across as selfish, narrow-minded, and reactionary. The terrible scene above, where the man has to warble out of tune to appease his wife, is because she’s angry at him for going in to work on Valentine’s Day. He’s a police officer. It’s a pretend holiday. And she has a snit about it for the entire hour. Don’t even get me started on the mother cornering her son’s girlfriend on the street and begging her to ask God how he feels about… something. Whatever the issue is, it is too horrific a topic to say the word out loud. Think of the children!
GRADE: F
ALLY MCBEAL
Episode 3.21, “Ally McBeal: The Musical, Almost”
The half-hearted way in which this episode is titled should have been my first clue that this show wasn’t going to go all-out in embracing a musical mindset. I had seen a handful of Ally McBeal episodes back in the day when Robert Downey Jr. was on it, and we were all very concerned that his career was ending, and I was trying to be supportive. It sounds funny now, but a decade ago he was always a hairs-breadth from jail or the grave. I didn’t enjoy the show too much, though, as I found the main character insufferable.
Ten years hasn’t improved my opinion of her, either. In the tissue-thin plot of this episode, Ally gets manic at the thought of having dinner with her parents and her boyfriend, and proceeds to jabber moronically, give in to shrieking giggles, hallucinate, and finally storm out. However, because her father made a couple of snarky comments, she is convinced he ruined the dinner and spends the rest of the episode trying to get him to apologize.
The musical interludes are scattered into the show without any real rhyme or reason. Some of them happen onstage during a party, but some are just random characters attempting pop songs that are shoe-horned into the plot. (At one point, Ally says a line from The Music Man which makes absolutely no sense in context—NONE—just so she and her boyfriend can butcher the song “Lida Rose.”)
With all that said, though, a couple of the musical numbers are actually excellent. Jane Krakowski has a lovely voice, and she does a couple of splendid numbers, including a Cabaret-inspired take of “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down.” Randy Newman guest-stars and sings a couple of tunes as well, and Randy Newman makes everything better. YouTube clips are thin on the ground for this episode, so you’d have to take my word for it.
GRADE: C-
NORTHERN EXPOSURE
Episode 4.25, “Old Tree”
This show is a bit of a favorite of mine, and although I’ve seen large consecutive chunks, I often stumble across an episode I previously missed, like this one. You could make an argument either for or against this being a “musical” episode. For the most part, the town of Cicely, Alaska is just up to its usual wacky shenanigans. An old tree—named Vicky—is diseased and needs to be cut down. The town rallies around her, however, and grieves when she is finally felled. Chris pontificates on the radio about the importance of trees in myth, religion and literature. It’s classic Northern Exposure.
However, Shelly, the blond ditz who is pregnant with the baby of her sexagenarian partner, is living out her own little musical subplot. She wakes up one morning completely unable to talk. Instead she sings—at first happily, but with growing concern that she’ll never be able to stop. This isn’t bizarrely out of the ordinary for a show where mythological creatures pop up in the woods and dead people are semi-regular characters.
In addition to incidental dialogue and background singing, Shelly only has three main songs. The actress, Cynthia Geary, has a nice enough voice, but the best moment is when she’s joined by Holling in what turns into a rather sweet little duet:
GRADE: B-
OZ
Episode 5.06, “Variety”
I knew just enough about Oz going into it to be somewhat nervous. And although it did include all the violence and profanity that you’d expect, there was also more standing around and talking about everyone’s secret pain than I would have expected from a hard-bitten prison drama. Add to that the fact that this was a musical episode, and the end result was a very odd animal.
It’s difficult to summarize the plot, as it was wildly episodic. There were, perhaps, fifteen subplots playing out during the hour, with about two minutes spent on each. Intricacy can be an asset, but this method of storytelling just felt convoluted. As soon as you became interested and invested in one story, it would abandon the thread and switch over to something new. I’m not familiar enough with the show as a whole to know if it normally played out that way, or if it was a convention chosen to mirror the framing device of this particular episode, which was a Variety Show.
Nominally, the Variety Show is the excuse for the musical numbers, but that doesn’t exactly track with the way it is played. Only one song of the variety show itself is shown: a badly beaten man named Omar tentatively sings out “I Wanna Be Free” while he is both cheered and jeered by his audience. The production values in that scene are deliberately bad—there’s feedback and interruptions and noise—but it’s an interesting scene.
Other than that, the musical numbers take place in a hyper-realistic space that, apparently, is substituting for the show’s regular narrator. Various characters stand in a box and sing out covers of songs, with differing degrees of success. If the songs had any connection to the action of the show, they completely escaped me. Some of the songs felt like they were supposed to be funny (like the priest giving an impassioned rendition of Tori Amos’ sexually assertive song “Leather,” or the white supremacist doing a sentimental love duet with another prisoner) but I wasn’t laughing, I was just baffled.
There were, however, points of real interest and talent in the smorgasbord of a story. The show has a laundry list of actors that I enjoy, and it was a pleasure every time yet another favorite wandered in. For the most part, they picked strong singers to have solos in the magical variety box, including the fantastic J. K. Simmons. My favorite musical moment, though, was a character named Redding, whose gravelly, bluesy voice was perfect for a rendition of “Handsome Johnny.” I could listen to that all day.
You can see that song, along with several others from the episode, here:
GRADE: C
BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER
Episode 6.07, “Once More With Feeling”
I can’t really pretend to be impartial here. Not only is this one of my favorite shows, but I genuinely believe this is one of the best hours of television ever produced. I’ve seen it a dozen times. I have the soundtrack on my iTunes. “Once More with Feeling” is the gold standard of musical episodes. It doesn’t just makes lists for the best television episodes of all time—the website Channel 4 actually listed it as the thirteenth best musical of all time—right below My Fair Lady. Fans have organized enormous sing-a-longs and fan conventions around it.
Part of its success is the talent involved, but part of it is the sheer amount of time, money and effort that Whedon funneled into it. This single episode took over four months to produce, and took a large chunk of season six’s budget. The actors all took personal time for singing, recording, and dance instruction. The results are somewhat extraordinary, and redefined what could be accomplished in an hour of television.
The premise of the episode is that a debonair demon has been accidentally released in Sunnydale, which causes all the residents to burst into spontaneous song and dance. It’s fun at first, until people realize that they’re belting out things that they’d rather keep hidden, and people start dancing so intensely that they are incinerated. Whedon’s songs gleefully mimic traditional Broadway conventions: there’s an overture, the retro-pastiche number “I’ll Never Tell,” complete with silk pajamas and three-wall set, the Disney-heroine-esque “Going Through the Motions,” with a vampire-dust reveal at the climax, and even a dream ballet sequence.
Whedon also seemed to have a knack for maximizing his actor’s skills as singers. They all get songs that are well-matched to their tone and talents, and most of their singing ranges from extraordinary (Anthony Stewart Head, of course) to passable (Michelle Trachtenberg), with the weaker voices getting less focus. Alyson Hannigan famously only sang solo for about fifteen seconds, including the self-referential “I think this line’s mostly filler.”
In addition to the great music involved, though, the gimmick is used not only to propel the plot forward, but to explode it. Secrets come tumbling out tunefully, and the ramifications of that echo throughout the rest of the season. Evil is vanquished at the end, but who are the real losers? The demon croons as he’s disappearing: “All those secret’s you’ve been concealing… say you’re happy now: once more, with feeling.” The end is therefore bittersweet, as you can hear in this clip:
GRADE: A+
CHICAGO HOPE
Episode 4.03, “Brain Salad Surgery”
I was excited to see this episode and went in with very high expectations. I’d never seen the show before, but I’ve been in love with Mandy Patinkin’s voice since high school. He’s Broadway royalty—surely a musical episode where he is featured would be great, right?
Well, yes and no. The set-up for the musical is that the surgeon Aaron suddenly collapses with a brain aneurysm and begins to hallucinate that everyone around him is singing and dancing. Does that sound familiar? The musical episode of Scrubs used the same premise. Now, I’m not a doctor, but some fierce googling hasn’t turned up “musical hallucinations” as being a symptom of aneurysms. In fact, the most common symptom of an aneurysm seems to be a sudden case of being extremely dead.
Anyway, instead of the joyful life-is-a-song approach that most musical episodes take, Chicago Hope uses the music to enhance the confused dream-state of the doctor. Most of the songs are actually the original recordings of pop hits (like “Kick in the Head,” being sung by Dean Martin, or “Brand New Key” by Melanie) and instead of being covered by the cast, the actors simply lip-sync along with the songs. It’s not supposed to seem realistic—sometimes the genders don’t even match—and is effectively creepy.
The notable exception is Patinkin, who apparently had left the show by the fifth season, but returned for this episode as a guest star. He sings his own covers of a couple honky-tonk classics and dispenses confused philosophical advice.
Unfortunately, though, the quarter of the episode throws off its own internal logic, and the doctors suddenly start singing for themselves in a big production of “Luck Be a Lady.” The cast members who are singing aren’t particularly talented, and it’s a cheery song, so the scene feels very fun and silly. However, this scene takes place while the main character of the show is undergoing dangerous brain surgery, so the emotional punch is almost completely negated. It’s an interesting experiment, but I’m not sure it was wholly successful.
GRADE: B-
THAT 70’S SHOW
Episode 4.24, “That 70’s Musical”
This is one of those shows that I’ve seen a number of episodes without ever quite intending to do so, and without ever particularly liking it. The premise is simplistic and obvious, and the show always seemed to be skating along on the charm of a few of the leads, aided with a hefty dose of viewer nostalgia.
That opinion is underscored by the half-hearted attempt at a musical episode. The plot couldn’t have taken any longer to think up than it takes to type out: Fez is in a concert and is afraid his friends won’t show up, but they do. Meanwhile, he randomly fantasizes that various characters are belting out classic rock tunes. The actors make pretty sorry singers, except (oddly enough) for Topher Grace, who holds his own. They make up for it with decent choreography and dancing in retro outfits, but does that really equal entertainment?
Decide for yourself:
GRADE: D
BATMAN: THE BRAVE AND THE BOLD
Episode 1.24, “Mayhem of the Music Meister”
I have to admit: Neil Patrick Harris’ transition from former child star to Hollywood’s favorite charmer delights me. I probably wouldn’t have checked out this episode when it aired if he hadn’t been involved, and I found it deliciously entertaining. For those of you unfamiliar with the premise of the show, there’s this rich guy whose parents died, and he’s really upset about it. Also, you should get out of the house more. There’s some great voice talent involved in the show, and the original songs are catchy and appropriate. They really let Harris show off his chops and range.
Black Canary also has a lovely voice, very warm and lush, and her torch song duet with the Meister, “If Only,” is my personal favorite song in the episode, and it probably wouldn’t be out of place in a major Broadway production… that was about Batman.
In this episode, the Music Meister uses his singing voice to hypnotize everyone within hearing range into obeying him. The plot threads are just the tiniest bit nonsensical (does Batman always carry around ear plugs? And why would singing the highest note break Meister’s spell?) but we ignore that because it’s all so much fun. Batman saves the world with punching. It’s awesome.
You can see the first third of the episode here:
GRADE: A
I know there are more special musical episodes out there that I couldn’t find. If you’ve seen them, let me know how they rate!
