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Tina Fey: "Girls5eva"

 It's always a treat to discover a new voice--anywhere--so today I'm tipping a hat to Meredith Scardino. She doesn't even have her own Wikipedia entry, and yet she is responsible for the show I keep hearing about, "Girls5eva."


Granted, this show also has a Tina Fey imprint, and you can "hear" Fey in some of the lines. For example, Fey contributed to the song "Dream Girlfriend": "I'm your dream girlfriend....cuz my dad is dead. Tell me again why Quentin Tarantino is a genius....." That Tarantino sentence--a marvel of economy and a line with "bite"--seems to me to be Classic Tina Fey.

Other moments do *not* have Fey's name attached to them. For example, the titular girls' group--a pop group we follow around throughout the first season--has a loopy signature song:

We're gonna be famous 5eva...
Cuz 4eva's too short....
Gonna be best friends 3-getha....
That's one more than 2-getha.....

This is so wonderfully bad (and it becomes a cause for giddiness when you learn that the fifth singer fell off the edge of an infinity pool, and so in fact Girls5eva is now a group of four)....I feel I'm ready to follow Scardino wherever she takes me.

I'm also happy that this show is giving time to Broadway's Daniel Breaker, who plays a mildly depressed dad interested in competitive cycling. ("It's cycling, not biking...." "This one guy, his head is so flat, it cuts through the wind like a knife....") Breaker worries that a new translucent piano in his living room will lead to fatalities, but he does not have the courage to speak up. Also, his idea of a fun Friday night is to "start Season One of THE AMERICANS--!" We hear grim TV voices repeatedly whispering, "Let's obtain this secret.....through sex....." Breaker falls asleep within three minutes. Something about all of this "speaks to me."

Inspiration for any writer--in the form of lunacy.
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