If anyone can get “complicated,” niche comedies greenlit, its executive producing duo Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. And while Girls5eva has the Fey stamp of humor written all over it, it is actually the brainchild of Meredith Scardino. The fact that she’s no stranger to the Fey brand of comedy after writing for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and Saturday Night Live makes the style perhaps come across as “mimicry.” And might only add to the confusion for some about how Fey wasn’t the responsible party for this work of comedic brilliance. And yet, it’s easy to see this show is the work of a millennial (even if a “geriatric” one), for Fey instead came of age during a decade well-before the pop juggernaut stylings of the late 90s/early 00s. During Fey’s adolescence, which took place during the Reagan years, it was, in so many ways, a simpler time. Mainly because pop hadn’t yet been fully navigated as a frothy, visual medium. Which is perhaps why Madonna single-handedly invented it for the women who would come after her.
But M was a rare a breed (and still is). Her pop came with a purpose beyond singing about being hopelessly in love or wrongfully jilted. What’s more, she was a lone wolf among the female singers who were then actually told to remain “buttoned up.” And yes, the 1980s, in many ways, had more “wholesome” fare to offer—Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, that sort of thing. It wasn’t really until the late 90s that the idea of “throwing a group of girls together” (always three or five, for whatever reason) and sexualizing them was suddenly seen by record companies as the ultimate business model. And yes, here it’s obvious the primary girl group that Girls5eva pulls most of its lampooning inspiration from is the Spice Girls. This was the band that started it all, really—in terms of establishing the “formula” for what would dominate musical trends for roughly the next decade (though what would really start the parodying trend of bands like these was an MTV movie from 2000 called 2ge+her, followed by the appearance of DuJour in 2001’s Josie and the Pussycats—and even Spice World itself was something of a satirical acknowledgement of the girl/boy band craze. So yeah, just saying there was some self-awareness of the absurdity of this genre during its heyday).
Just as the Spice Girls were “formed” (like clay, by a man) in 1994 after Heart Management placed an ad in The Stage seeking eighteen to twenty-three-year-olds who could sing and dance, so, too, goes the tale of how Girls5eva was “created.” As they tell Carson on TRL (something Gen Z will never understand, no matter how many Spotify lists they “curate”), “We’ve been best friends ever since we auditioned for a man in a motel in New Jersey.” “We also saw the same ad written onto a newspaper,” Gloria (Erika Henningsen, and later, Paula Pell) chimes in. Dawn (Sara Bareilles) adds, “But it was fate that Larry picked us ‘cause we’re gonna be friends 5eva.” Clearly, we saw how that worked out for the Spice Girls as well. And, in a similar fashion, someone had to be the catalyst for breaking up the group because she felt they simply couldn’t “take it any further.” While that might have been Geri for the Spice Girls (and Camila Cabello for Fifth Harmony), it’s Wickie (Renée Elise Goldsberry) for Girls5eva.
She, too, doesn’t give very much time to the group once it gets famous. Like the Spice Girls, there’s about two years of chart dominance (even though they’re billed as a one-hit wonder for “Famous 5eva”) before things fall apart. Whereas Spice Girls started their journey in ’94 (before their debut, Spice, was released in ’96), Girls5eva was first “invented” in ‘99, the dawn of the teen pop star/boy band era that would define the early to mid-00s musical landscape. And while Spice Girls might have spurred the girl group revival, it was Britney Spears’ 1999 debut, “…Baby One More Time” that solidified the submissive schmaltz that dominated lyrical themes for years to come (hear also: “I’m A Slave 4 U”). This fact lends plenty of opportunity for Scardino and the musical composer for Girls5eva’s songs, Jeff Richmond (yes, Fey’s husband and the man responsible for the 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt themes), to parody the ridiculousness of some of these types of songs.
Case in point, their single, “Dream Girlfriends,” in which they proudly declare, “We are dream girlfriends/‘Cause our dads are dead so you’ll never have to meet them/And get asked why you left school/Dream girlfriends, no pushback/‘Cause our moms are all retired and hoping for the best/We’ve got the kind of birth control that goes in your arm/And tell me again why Tarantino’s a genius.” Other marks of the 00s time period include the lyrics, “Low-rise jeans with a one-tooth zipper/Eyebrows thin, bronzer thicker/Whale tail peakin’/Ready for the weekend.” It’s like Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie could have written it themselves.
But one element Girls5eva makes all its own is the idea of Gloria struggling to suppress her sexuality for the duration of her girl band tenure. While we’ve seen this happen in real life with ex-boy band members like Lance Bass (in the show, too, it’s clearly Kev [Andrew Rannells] from Boys Next Door), the female struggle with sexuality repression hasn’t been as spotlighted. Gloria, as the “Sporty” one (yes, like Sporty Spice), which we all know is code for “lesbian,” serves as the representative for this underexplored “phenomenon.” And the idea that women of the era were forced to remain in a tight box (no pun intended) of heteronormativity even more restrictive than the one for men. For while “homoerotic” is passable in a Backstreet Boys context, it was less so for the likes of, say, Danity Kane (also another girl group that started with five members and then went down to three, like Destiny’s Child).
But Gloria’s sexuality is the one “deviation” from the norm of how the pop music trajectory goes for most women. Thus, Girls5eva is also sure to incorporate a sendup of Swedish powerhouse Max Martin into an episode called “Alf Musik.” Played by Stephen Colbert, Alf is the ultimate “mysterious” “genius,” who has recently turned reclusive. This means the girls have to get creative about how to communicate that they need another song from him, using his ego against him by tricking his assistant into thinking someone from MasterClass will just ask David Guetta to film a teaching session instead. When their true identities are revealed, Musik is prompted to comment, “It has been an entire Zendaya since you have recorded music.” Actually, not really—‘cause Zendaya is twenty-four, but whatever; it’s pop culture hyperbole.
Much like the lesser-known song that makes high-powered manager Nance Trace (Vanessa Williams) remember who Girls5eva are in the first place. For when she stumbles upon them plotting her abduction at a radio conference, she says, “I remember you, you had that song on the soundtrack of Blue Crush.” “TBF,” Gloria reminds. The quartet then joins in with Nance to sing, “TBF/Tiny butts forever/Two silver dollar pancakes in jeans/This will be what people like forever/TBF/Tiny butts in jeans.”
Seeing a financial opportunity in managing them if they agree to go their separate (separ8) ways again, Nance makes them individual offers they all ultimately can’t refuse. Granted, Wickie is, as usual, the first to readily defect. And yet, the second time around, it feels truly wrong to all of them to split up—just when they’d each reclaimed their voice as this girl group entity that ironically took it away from them so long ago. Back when their fifth member, Ashley (Ashley Park), was still alive… before drowning in an infinity pool. Speaking of her, a S1m0ne-like moment comes when they’re able to project Ashley as a hologram out of their iPad, the computer feeding her the key phrases they need to make the collaboration work—that is, until she starts reading from Gloria’s highly personal emails.
In any case, breaking up a second time just doesn’t quite ring true for these women, even though it should more so now that they’re older. So it is that they take the stage at Jingle Ball (their longstanding goal since reuniting) by rogue means. Even though it infers risking all the financial stability they had just secured, they can’t fight the urge within them to sing their new original composition, “Four Stars.” Looking on at their foolish (yet still girlish) actions, Nance sighs, “Teens are so much more controllable.” And yes, that is the capitalizing, bleak reality of why teen girls are still the ones so often most targeted for a record deal (ahem, Billie Eilish and Olivia Rodrigo). Not just the fact that “pop culture relevance is a young girl’s game.”
It is all about girl power, after all. There is, of course, an undeniable irony to the Spice Girls’ key catchphrase becoming popular at a time when the music industry was experiencing a misogynistic renaissance. One that still has so much further to go in fully shaking it off (Taylor-style). Girls5eva, through its sardonic lens, helps not only to shed light on just how fucked up the late 90s/early 00s pop music machine was, but also to show us that change is possible in the present. What we choose to willingly absorb punctuated with more inquisitiveness than ever before.
It’s no secret that there is sadness in the comedic, comedy in the tragic. Girls5eva often toes that line by addressing something that keeps seeming to come up of late: the 00s really weren’t all that “progressive.” In fact, the pop music industry might have set progression back several decades with its overproduced melodies and infecting hooks smokescreening a chauvinistic multibillion dollar enterprise. Yes, the earworms of the day linger on in many of our minds, leading us to ask of late: to what detriment to our worldview?
