Galavant Sundays, 8 p.m., ABC.
The first thing you notice about Galavant is that it’s like nothing else on TV: It plays with the conventions of fairy tales and fantasy stories, but it’s not a mash-up of existing characters like Once Upon a Time or a gritty, violent drama like Game of Thrones. It’s a musical, but it doesn’t repurpose pop songs like Glee or frame its musical numbers as performances by its characters like Nashville. More than anything, the first season’s eight half-hour episodes play like an extended Broadway musical with really high production values, and the audacity of throwing multiple original songs (sung by the characters and integral to the progression of the plot) into each episode is impressive, even if the songs aren’t all keepers. ABC is burning through the season two episodes at a time over four weeks, and it’s not hard to imagine network executives being baffled at how to market this odd (and oddly charming) show.
Although the format is unique, the plot is fairly familiar, a self-aware parody of the traditional knight’s quest. In this case the knight is the title character (Joshua Sasse), who loses his lady love Madalena (Mallory Jansen) to the evil King Richard (Timothy Omundson) and dedicates himself to winning her back. In the process, he also promises to save the kingdom of the lovely Princess Isabella (Karen David), whose humble charms will obviously win him over. Creator Dan Fogelman went a little overboard with cheesy jokes on his last series, the aliens-in-suburbia sitcom The Neighbors, but here he mostly finds a nice balance between goofy puns and winking references to the show’s own silliness.
He’s helped immensely by songwriters Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, both Disney veterans. Menken’s work includes music for The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast and Aladdin, while Slater wrote lyrics for the underrated Tangled (with music by Menken). Together they put together songs that are as catchy as their Disney work, with lyrics that are raunchier and more irreverent. The arrangements aren’t as lavish as those in Disney songs, and the singing is not always as strong, but the effect is frequently delightful. The burden of having several new songs in each half-hour episode means that sometimes minor characters get their own forgettable musical numbers, but the advantage of episodic TV is that it’s free to make such digressions.
The cast of relatively unfamiliar faces is strong, especially Omundson as the foppish, insecure despot, and it’s refreshing to see female characters in a traditional fairy-tale setting who have their own agency (even if, as in the case of Madalena, it means that they’re horrible people). The eclectic guest-star roster includes John Stamos, “Weird Al” Yankovic, Ricky Gervais and Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville, all clearly having fun with their absurd characters. TV audiences may not have known they needed a small-screen equivalent of Spamalot—and the network may not really know what to do with it—but Galavant turns out to be completely winning in all its cheesy glory.
