What Makes 'Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist' So Extraordinary
Eli Azizolahoff
This year NBC premiered a new musical show called Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. The show centers around a woman working as a computer coder in San Francisco who gets caught in an MRI machine during an earthquake and suddenly begins to hear the people around her singing their thoughts and feelings.
Zoey, played by Jane Levy, labels these songs she hears as “heart-songs” since they expose the true sentiment in each person’s heart. Teaming up with her neighbor and friend, Mo (Alex Newell), the pair try to figure the nature and limitations of her new abilities and what they mean for her. Zoey determines that each time she hears someone’s song it means she is meant to help them in some capacity. Her power also allows her to reconnect with her father, played by Peter Gallagher, who is dying of the degenerative disease Progressive Supranuclear Palsy (PSP), because he sings her his heart-songs as well. The show follows her trials and triumphs with her new power, the awkward situations it lends her to, and the lives of Zoey and the people around her – including a love triangle between her, her best friend Max (Skylar Astin) and her engaged coworker, Simon (John Clarence Stewart).
The show follows the style of jukebox musicals, with the characters bursting out into popular songs like Ke$ha’s “TikTok,” (performed by Lauren Graham), the Beatles’ “Help!” (an ensemble number), and Nick Jonas’s “Jealous” (performed by John Clarence Stewart). Each number is choreographed and performed like those you would see in a musical and generally the characters have no idea they are singing, with the exception of Zoey (of course).
When I initially began watching this show, I had my hesitations about it. Previous musical shows I had watched had either leaned into their campiness – see: Galavant – or they felt insincere in their musicality and contrived in their sudden bursting into song. There are exceptions of course, and I have often found shows like Glee and SMASH, that center around the world of music and musical theater, can pull off this technique better than others. This being the case, seeing Zoey, the awkward left-brained coder who is uncomfortable with emotions and rarely listens to music in her day-to-day life, enters a world of sudden dancing and over the top theatrics made me tentative about how successful this medium would be for the show.
At first, the musical numbers did feel as contrived to me as I initially worried they would, but I quickly fell into the mythos Zoey’s world and my dissonance with it fell away. What furthered my investment into the show – and my acceptance of the theatrics – is that despite how fantastical the premise may seem, the plot – and more importantly – the characters felt more real than most other American shows I have recently watched.
A complaint I have found myself voicing time and again is that Western media has grown to feel contrived, not just in its premises, but in its characterization. American TV will present copy after copy of trope-filled characters that react too perfectly, feel disingenuous, and/or present as fictionally as they are. Rachel Pincus noted in a discussion about why she prefers Korean TV over American that “something that I like is that people feel more real in Asian dramas, in the way they interact with each other. It feels more natural in that its awkward, versus American [shows] where everything is so polished, and even when it’s not polished it’s still like… contrived.”
This complaint has been echoed by many other TV fans and is one of the major reasons I was so delighted with Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist. Much like K-Drama, the show is set with a fantastic, absurd, and almost cheesy premise – that Zoey can hear people’s heart-songs – but within these oddities, the humanity and human-ness of the characters shine through. The characters in Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist ring true as real people, even as they burst into song and dance.
Perhaps it is because we as the audience gets insight into each character’s mind via their heart-songs, or perhaps it is because they all seem to react as real people would to real situations, but each character in the show rings with a sense of complexity, genuineness, and understanding that matches the multifaceted nature of real people.
Take for example Simon, one of the prongs of Zoey’s love triangle (insert “SPOILERS!” warning here). Beyond just being a hot-guy in her workplace, the audience – and Zoey – have the opportunity to bond with him over his mourning his father who committed suicide in the past year. When he gets caught between his interest in Zoey and his engagement, it is not based in a lust-filled frenzy, but rather because he has connected with Zoey over their mutual trauma in losing parents. This bond draws him to her when he cannot find a similar one in his actual relationship. Additionally, his fiancé is not vilified – as she would be in most other Western shows – but is rather shown as a genuine woman who has tried to be there for her hurting fiancé but simply doesn’t know what to do, not that she doesn’t care for him.
Even the nature of the love triangle itself – a trope I find overdone and irrelevant in my opinion – is manifested with a sense of honesty. When Zoey learns that her best friend has a crush on her, she freaks out – not in the contrived way we so often see in dramas, that is fixed by the end of the episode, but with a truth that follows her. Her relationship with Max is an important one in her life, and she doesn’t want to ruin it. Therefore, her reaction to his heart-song love confession isn’t swept away in a single episode but is something she grapples with throughout the season. When she analyzes her desire for Simon versus her longing for Max, it is not a decision of weighing hormones against practicality, it is her sizing up two men for all they are, and trying to follow her heart to the right one.
Max is actually one of my favorite characters in the show and is arguably the most grounded. While he is in love with Zoey, he does not manifest it with the “nice guys finish last” mentality that we see in so many other shows, nor does he act as if she owes him (I’m looking at you Ross from Friends). Rather, his frustrations with her come from Zoey genuinely not treating him well, and we see him function with self-respect and refuse to be a doormat to her whims – like so many other characters in his position have done. One of my favorite Max moments is in episode eight, “Zoey’s Extraordinary Glitch,” when Zoey’s powers are on the fritz and instead of hearing other people’s heart-songs in her head, she sings her own heart-songs out loud to the people around her. In this episode, she is faced head-on with her feelings for both Max and Simon but when she ends up bursting into song and dance in front of the CEO of the company she works at, Max steps up and performs with her in order to make it seem like it was part of the presentation and save her job. Max is obviously not saving Zoey in this scene because he wants her to choose him, but rather because regardless of their love triangle, he and Zoey are best friends and he is there to support her.
On the nature of authenticity, additional praise must be given to both the actors and the writers. Emily Ornelas noted that “the dialogue was really naturalistic like there were certain quirks to the actual speaking of the actors that I thought was really human.” She gave the example of when Zoey comes to Simon for their first date, holding a fern because “she had no idea what to bring in this kind of situation” it seemed like a true awkward statement rather than a fake smooth line from a TV heroine, one Ornelas joked she could see herself making in the same position.
Ms. Ornelas also noted that throughout the show the plot didn’t seem drastic – not falling into the easy tropes most comedies use like miscommunication and intentional dishonesty – but rather, it felt like real human experiences, and the fact that the writers did not need to really on those easy clichés was “so refreshing.” She pointed out that “people communicated, if they had an issue they communicated, if they had boundaries they wanted to set, they set those boundaries, they were able to do that - they were able to ask for space.” In this manner, the characters manifested as mature adults rather than convoluting their own situations even further by refusing to face them head-on.
These kinds of tropes are so overused in modern television and they lend largely to why American dramas have become so difficult for me to watch – if your characters are adults, make them act like it! Not that they should always know exactly what to say, but rather they should have the presence of mind to be self-aware and treat others with respect and maturity – as real adults must.
Another fan, Shira Eisenberg, noted on the finale, how real it felt to her that the love triangle – a center conflict throughout the show – suddenly became unimportant when Zoey is faced with real hardship. Because that is people genuinely feel; bills and drama and heartbreak and work can feel like they mean everything to you, and in a single moment of tragedy none of them are really significant.
Whether it be the characterization, the acting, the subtle but moving plot, the intentional awkwardness of the dialogue, the maturity of the characters, or the value they put on things in their life, Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist shines past its absurd premise to encapsulate real humanity. TV, and all media for that matter, has the power to represent different versions of our world. I would argue that with that power, comes the responsibility to not only show radical examples of what the world could be, but also honest translations of it. A show doesn’t need a realistic premise to ring true to its audience, it needs to present its universe as one filled with people that behave and react the way we and the people around us do. To me, the most extraordinary thing about Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist is how real and honest the show is, even while bursting into song and dance.