The Musical Episode-Part 1 the Breakdown

While I’m still hard at work on my Hollywood curses series, I thought I would write some stand alone blogs on…well whatever I want to talk about. And right now that would be the idea of the musical episode. You know what I’m talking about, when a totally normal show has one episode where suddenly the characters we know and love are bursting out into song and dance numbers. It’s super weird and I absolutely love them. It doesn’t matter if they’re a train wreck of an episode (which most are) or.. actually good, I have been trying to watch as many as I possible can over the years, weather I am a fan of the show or have never seen another episode of said show. I just find it funny and insane the idea of getting actors on a show who weren’t hired for their musical talent, to suddenly have them singing and dancing to the best of their abilities, and writers having to come up with some reason as to why suddenly this would happen. And finally having to get together a team of musicians and what kind of music and songs to use in the episode. In this part I will be breaking down these choices and which ones I prefer. In part two I will be discussing the musical episodes, I’ve seen, enjoyed in a so bad it’s good sense, and the few that are actually good.

So with that out of the way, let’s go over the ways a normal show will have the musical numbers work in context. Television shows live in their own world, but most of these worlds don’t have choreographed musical numbers every ten minutes, so the first step is creating the reason for this. In most shows there are two options, the most common is the dream, or more likely fever dream. Medical shows like Scrubs and Grey’s anatomy use this plot device of a patient being injured and dreaming that everyone around them is singing and dancing. Other shows like Even Stevens have one of the main characters sick in bed and at the end it’s revealed the whole episode is a dream (although with context clues its pretty easy to figure it out). That’s 70s shows musical episode is different in that the character’s just daydream a music video, (I’m not sure if it counts…eh it counts). The other way is a magical spell has been cast over our characters forcing them to sing out all of their hearts desires, or some kind of magical place where people sing out their feelings. This mainly happen in Sci-Fi/Fantasy shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Once Upon a Time, Xena: Warrior Princess, and The Flash/Supergirl crossover (or is that one a dream sequence, or both…) this ones rare and really only a fantasy based show can do it, and its actually a lot of fun watching characters dancing around and having the, what’s going on look on their face. There are a few shows (Cough..Riverdale..Cough) will just have musical numbers in an episode for no reason, but those shows are pretty ridiculous already, and those episodes are fun train wrecks anyway so I don’t really care, cause I’m here for all of the crazies.

The finally item I wish to talk about is song choice, not individual songs, but the choice of either writing there own songs for the episodes or deciding to be a jukebox musical and just using popular songs that fit the context of the episode (or not who knows). Most shows will go with the latter, picking around 5-10 popular songs that fit around the storyline. Their a risk with both, with writing your own songs, there’s the risk of them…well sucking, I will say that the few musical episodes I’ve watched where this is the case, the songs are either great or at least catchy enough that it takes several listens for me to come to the conclusion that they suck, but their suck ear worms that I still listen to them. The jukebox musical is definitely less of a risk, (if you pick good songs), and the biggest worrying is making sure the songs fit into the plot of the episode, sometimes these episodes are based around a established musical (Riverdale) or there is one original song (Flash/Supergirl) which shows some creativity, but for me personally, I give more credit to the shows that write original songs. It’s a risk but I appreciate the shows that take that risk, and the songs usually fit better into the show because, well their talking about what’s going on and what they’re feeling throughout the whole episode.

All right that’s the end of part one. In part two, I’ll be going over the musical episodes I’ve seen, my relationship to that show, and what I liked and disliked about each of them. Let me know what your favorite musical episode is and your favorite song from a musical episode. Take care guys! :D