There’s so much talent in Apple TV+’s musical comedy “Schmigadoon!” that it’s somewhat disappointing to report that the show is merely a modest diversion instead of a must-watch musical extravaganza. You’ll almost certainly laugh a little. You probably won’t cry. But it’s definitely better than “Cats.” Of course, a nice three hours of escapist musical comedy with incredible performers has some value, but this is the kind of show that feels like it’s constantly falling short of its oversized potential. It comes to life in bursts, leading one to hope that it will cohere into something more daring and complex around the next toe-tapping corner, but then it recedes back to the surface, afraid to really engage with any of its ideas about love, relationships, or even classic musicals. Sure, it’s fun, but it’s almost more disposable than the broadly goofy stage plays that it parodies.
While it is something of a spoof of a number of musicals (there’s some “Carousel,” “Oklahoma,” “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers,” “The Music Man,” and more in here), the main template for this show by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio is actually, of course, “Brigadoon.” That 1949 Broadway musical by Lerner & Loewe is about a pair of American tourists who stumble onto a Scottish village that appears out of the mist for only one day. Of course, one of them falls in love, and there’s a whole lot of singing and dancing (a highlight being “Almost Like Being in Love”). It was adapted in 1954 into a solid film version with Gene Kelly and Cyd Charisse, directed by the great Vincente Minnelli.
Over seven decades later, the new Apple TV+ series takes the structure of “Brigadoon” and shifts it to center a struggling couple on a hike to try and salvage their relationship when they stumble upon a village called Schmigadoon that appears stuck in Golden Age musicals. As if they can’t control themselves, villagers regularly break into song, often to express emotions that they can’t through words. As the annoyed Josh Skinner (Keegan-Michael Key) says, “It’s like if ‘The Walking Dead‘ were also ‘Glee.’”
Josh’s partner Melissa (Cecily Strong) is more optimistic than her cynical partner (and more aware of the traditional musical structures that drive the town) and doesn’t even seem all that startled when the pair realizes they can’t leave Schmigadoon until they fall in love, although not necessarily with each other. To add an old-fashioned conflict, the writers split up Josh and Melissa, of course, sending them off to find potential love with others before inevitably bringing them back together, which is only a spoiler for people who have never seen a musical or any other film/TV series really.
After a break-up, Melissa and George work their way through Schmigadoon individually, and the show struggles a bit in its failure to define their relationship other than through brief flashbacks that open episodes. Melissa first gets wooed by a clever bad boy archetype named Danny Bailey (Tony nominee Aaron Tveit) and later by an uptight town doctor named Lopez (Jaime Camil). George flirts with a girl named Betsy McDonough (Dove Cameron) before first meeting her shotgun-wielding father and then the town schoolteacher (Ariana DeBose), who helps him figure out what’s important in his life. All of these relationships feel truncated, barely developed beyond a song or two, which could be an intentional riff on the relatively shallow nature of the Golden Age musical, but one also wonders if the pandemic shortened a longer, richer approach to the concept? “Schmigadoon!” feels like a 10-episode concept broken down into six.
It also often feels like a great supporting talent is wasted in the extended cast, probably because of the truncated season. How does a show based on classic musicals include Alan Cumming, Fred Armisen, and Kristin Chenoweth and barely utilize them? The always-fantastic Chenoweth doesn’t even get a juicy number until the fifth episode, and it might be the series’ best. Martin Short and Jane Krakowski pop up in cameos and the main sense they leave is that one wishes they were given more to do. That’s a common problem in “Schmigadoon!”—a feeling that the cast is good but underutilized.
It’s likely a product of the writing, which fails to find the substance or edge that could have made the concept weightier, and the direction from the once-great Barry Sonnenfeld feels similarly uninspired. Projects like “My Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and even “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist” have used musical structures to find something deeper than “relationships are tough” and Bryan Fuller has expertly found the thorns on the roses in visually poppy programs like “Pushing Daisies.” Despite its high-concept potential and simply incredible ensemble, “Schmigadoon!” doesn’t feel like it’s trying hard enough to really say or do anything. (Perhaps this shouldn’t be that surprising for a show from the writers of some of the most disposable animated blockbusters of modern times in the “Despicable Me” and “The Secret Life of Pets” movies.)
And yet that talent makes it enough of a breezy diversion that it feels like Anton Ego in a crowded theater of clapping fans to come down on it too hard. Again, the cast is uniformly strong, and almost all of them totally got the assignment. Strong is the stand-out, proving again that she’s always been one of the more underrated “Saturday Night Live” performers. One hopes this leads to more starring roles for an actress who absolutely deserves such a platform. The musical vets like Tveit, Cumming, DeBose, and Chenoweth give the entire project a theatrical background that really helps. The songwriting is hit or miss, working better when it’s “inspired by” more than when it’s a direct parody (a sex education riff on “Do-Re-Mi” is an example of where the writing feels at its weakest), but the show is overall buoyant enough that its relative shallowness may not register with viewers, especially the ones who end up cramming it in a three-hour chunk after it’s all premiered. It’s one of those comedies that works well enough at the moment and only loses the melody when one considers how great it could and should have been. [C]
“Schmigadoon!” debuts on Apple TV+ on July 16.