We’re all drowning in content—so it’s time to highlight the best. In her column published every Friday, critic Clarisse Loughrey recommends a new show to watch. This week: Apple TV+’s Schmigadoon, starring Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key and returning for another winning season parodying musicals.
Schmigadoon!: Season 2
Schmigadoon technically shouldn’t work. How much can a musical-comedy series—one that relies heavily on audiences recognising snippets of Rodgers and Hammerstein or certain Bob Fosse hand positions—sustain itself for not one, but two seasons in the wild wild west of streaming?
Created by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio, Schmigadoon came with the most unusual of premises. A couple, Melissa (Cecily Strong) and Josh (Keegan-Michael Key), are at a romantic impasse. While out on a hike, as part of a couples’ healing retreat, the pair stumble right into the middle of a well-dressed and well-choreographed Golden Age musical—drawing from the likes of Brigadoon, The Music Man, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and Oklahoma!. It’s dreamy. But it’s also not real life—and it forces Melissa and Josh to reconsider the meaning of true love.
The guarded attitude of all these streaming giants—Schmigadoon’s home over at Apple TV+ among them—means that there’s no real way of knowing how successful the series has actually been. All we know is that its audience justified a season two, while a season three remains entirely up in the air.
That said, I think Schmigadoon’s renewal is a healthy argument for why streamers shouldn’t be afraid to embrace the niche. Not every show has to tackle the universality of trauma or family bonds. Sometimes a show really can just be about the kind of wild excuses for rhyming that Stephen Sondheim got away with over the course of his career.
The series isn’t entirely impenetrable. There’s a careful tonal balance achieved through its central couple—Melissa (Cecily Strong) craves neatness and control, both in her life and in her musicals. That made her the go-to expert last season, when it was all courtships and petticoats. But, this time around, she’s out of her depth. When the toils of daily life mean Melissa and Josh once more dream of a musical escape, their attempt to return to Schmigadoon instead lands them in Schmicago—a reflection of the changing musical landscape of the 60s and 70s, too dark for Melissa but mainstream enough to be recognised by Josh. And so there’s always a chance for one to explain what’s going on to the other. While Broadway regulars and reformed Gleeks will get the most out of the experience, it’s still fun for the less acquainted.
Schmicago, as the show semi-retitles itself, isn’t as tonally consistent as its predecessor—that makes sense, since any journey through the history of musical theatre would need to accommodate for the whole variety of ways the medium revolutionised itself. On the one hand, there are the vampy worlds of Chicago, Cabaret, and Sweet Charity—complete with a Sally Bowles-esque Dove Cameron and a Billy Flynn-esque Jane Krakowski. This section comes with one of the best songs, which parodies their sexiness with lines like “there’s no norm we won’t transgress / I’m into boys and girls, does that just blow your mind!” Cut to Josh and Melissa half-heartedly shrugging.
Then there’s the hippie spirituality of Hair, Jesus Christ Superstar and, to some extent, Pippin, as captured by Topher (Aaron Tveit, one of Broadway’s most underrated performers) and his “tribe”. And, lastly, historical misery collides in a Miss Hannigan-meets-Sweeney Todd mash-up featuring Alan Cumming and Kristin Chenoweth. All of it is held together by one of the staples of the era, the fourth-wall breaking narrator (Tituss Burgess, born for this kind of role).
The parodies here feel more specific and instantly recognisable, and although the series occasionally gets muddled in its attempts to tie up all these disparate knots. But it’s still impressive how well it can swing from Ariana DeBose giving Schmigadoon‘s Emcee to Ariana DeBose giving Dreamgirls. And this is the thing about Schmigadoon—if nothing about this sounds appealing, then that’s fine. Because it was absolutely for me.
