One of the most delightful things about
Girls5eva, itself a delightful show, is the fact that there is an accompanying album of music to play on loop once you’re done watching it. The series focuses on a one-hit wonder girl group, Girls5eva, who find themselves once again in the spotlight after an up-and-coming artist samples one of their songs in his latest single.
Unsurprisingly, given that the cast includes Broadway stars like Sara Bareilles, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Andrew Rannells, among others, the songs often sound surprisingly credible as pop hits, even as their lyrics spoof decades’ worth of musical tropes. We spoke to the show’s creator, Meredith Scardino, and its composer, Jeff Richmond, to discuss the process of bringing the Girls5eva sound to life, and adapted their comments into the song-by-song guide below.
The songs come nearly as fast as the jokes in Girls5eva, Peacock s just-launched streaming sitcom about a B-list late- 90s girl group that gets back together when a present-day rap star named Lil Stinker samples its biggest hit.
Brought to you by the folks behind 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, season one s eight episodes are jammed with original music: snippets of old pop tunes by Girls5eva and its turn-of-the-millennium ilk, new songs the women write in hopes of a comeback, a tender and hilarious folk ditty that dramatizes one character s worries about her young son. (The surviving members of Girls5eva, whose late frontwoman is shown only in flashback, are played by Sara Bareilles, Busy Phillips, Paula Pell and Renee Elise Goldsberry; most of the music was written by the series creator, Meredith Scardino, and Jeff Richmond, an executive producer alongside his wife, Tina Fey.)
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Mean Girls, has added to his accomplishments with Peacock’s
Girls5eva. Richmond, who also produces the show with wife Tina Fey, composed the musicalcomedy’s funny, catchy original songs in collaboration with series creator and lyricist Meredith Scardino. In talking about their partnership, Richmond tells
The A.V. Club that it was a dream, and Scardino took charge of the lyrical content: “She knows how to find the joke within the style we are trying to emulate of this ’90s girl group.”
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The show centers on four women trying to revive their once famous band called Girls5eva. Richmond says the process of working on the songs was a collaborative give-and-take, and that they were inspired by Spice Girls, En Vogue, and Destiny’s Child, among others. The pair previously worked on Fey and Robert Carlock’s