Some Thoughts On "Galavant"

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Before we begin, let me just lay it out there that I actually enjoyed much of Galavant. Like the Mel Brooks When Things Were Rotten comedy aesthetic it frequently tries to ape, any cringing a bad joke might induce is minimized by a brisk pace and an admirable reluctance to dwell for too long. And even in spite of all the probably quite horrible things I am doubtless going to say about it, I will be sticking with it for at least the first few weeks, so that is something I suppose.

Now, two episodes in and we can tell a few things about Galavant, the latest attempt to bring the musical to television. The first and most encouraging thing we can tell is that this is not Cop Rock, the beige standard by which all subsequent attempts at TV musicals must be judged. That may not sound like much, but the knowledge that the weirdly and hilariously awful lightning of Cop Rock has not struck again is oddly heartening. 




At the same time, Galavant does seem to lack the demented level of conviction that Cop Rock had and which was simultaneously the best and absolute worst part of that show. It overall seems faintly embarrassed to be a musical, which is a shame because there are plenty of perfectly reasonable things for it to be embarrassed about.

The jokes generally fall into one of two categories, either this is funny because everybody is singing or this is funny because anachronistic vernacular is being used in a medieval setting. Contrary to what I expected and feared, there is actually not too much of the former with a few slightly unbearable exceptions. While this is a welcome relief, it means that much of the humor in the show has to lean on the latter type of joke, which while not actively painful is not typically very funny either.

A little bit of mileage is derived from subversions of genre tropes that manifest themselves in the frequent plot twists, but those subversions are never really adequately explored, and an opportunity is lost to examine why those tropes do not work in the world of today. But it is not really fair to criticize a show for not being what I would want it to be, I realize on reflection, so just file that under "opportunities missed" and then promptly forget about it.

The performances are all solid and frequently quite funny, with Timothy Omundson in particular doing far better than his part demanded as a tyrannical monarch who just wants to be loved but never carries the thought far enough to change his mode of behavior.

The music by Alan Menken is fine, although far from his best work, while the lyrics by Glen Slater have their moments but are nowhere near as off-the-wall as they would have to be to render the subversion jokes interesting and not, as the most cringey of the lyrics puts it, "a fairy-tale cliche."

None of this is to say that Galavant is bad. It's perfectly serviceable. What it isn't is good enough to be the kick in the pants that the musical needs to become mainstream again. It manages to sidestep the hurdles that would have left it looking like, to take an entirely random example, Cop Rock...



...which I find gratifying, because as much as I love Cop Rock in all its mutant glory, producing another one would serve no purpose but to hand a bucketful of slingshot ammunition to the knee-jerk musical-hating brigade and obligingly present its backside to them for a rollicking round of punishment. As it is, Galavant neither hurts nor substantially improves the cultural position of the musical. It will convert no one, but neither will it become a tedious running joke. We will see.

I will be covering Galavant as it airs, so be sure to follow this blog for more down the line.

Comics vs. Stageplays vs. Film vs. TV

The stage shares a lot of characteristics with the comics format in that it permits simultaneous presentation of images in a way that novels and film do not. Unlike in comics, however, there is a limit to the number of simultaneous images the stage can present, which in turn is compensated for by the fact that it permits sound.

The implications of this might not be immediately obvious, but they are present and they are vast. First and most fundamentally, the inherent artificiality of the stage is a gift to magical realism of various levels of plausibility, since it has that extra layer of separation, that inability to make the audience truly believe that what it is showing them could be really there.This fact necessitates a great deal of suspension of disbelief right from the off, and therefore opens the door to far stranger and more radical techniques without necessarily damaging the realism of the setting since, as mentioned above, there is virtually none.

The Real Inspector Hound could only happen on the stage, since it relies on the interplay between the audience and the players on the stage. Indeed, two of the audience members are actors.

Also, think of the darkly subtle magical realism of Sondheim’s Assassins. All the historical assassins can appear together onstage to talk Lee Harvey Oswald into killing John F. Kennedy and the response of the audience is not “what? how did they get there? what’s going on?” but rather, “that’s incredible.” The inflated suspension of disbelief creates a layer of unreality through which such a technique can comfortably slip.

I would also like to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of television. I will be talking, for the most part, not about network television, which is and almost always has been an amateur theatrical set within the concept of despair, but about premium television like HBO or one of the major internet television providers such as Netflix, if only because that’s where the good stuff comes from.

The main point of comparison is to film, if only because in nearly all respects the two are practically identical, and so comparing it to anything else would simply involve me repeating myself.

Film is a very compact format, good for stories that mainly concern one character or one small group of characters. There can be subplots, but they must be fairly limited. At the same time, the discreteness of film can be an advantage. It is easier to perceive the shape of a story told on film, a film is easier to structure because there is less material to have to worry about, and in a film you know precisely where the end is. On the other hand, you don’t have as much time to play with the characters, you can’t follow the journeys of multiple characters, and you have to cut things down to a reasonably-paced narrative.

These last three are problems that do not afflict quality television, but it’s no fun to only look at the advantages, so let’s look at the disadvantages. Ongoing television series can have some of the same problems as ongoing comic book characters, in that if you don’t know where the end is going to be, you don’t know how to structure the damned thing. Thus ongoing stories tend to be very awkwardly structured. Some series, like The Wire, managed to avoid this by reserving each season for talking about how the drug trade affects different aspects of society, so each new season tackles a different front of the war on drugs. While characters may reoccur from previous series, they serve the new story. Each season is a complete story, well-structured and with a well-balanced ending.

This is why I like the mini-series better than the ongoing series as a format. Even if you have a fair amount of clout, you never have much more than an educated guess as to when an ongoing series is going to end. With the mini-series, you get all the advantages of a TV series (e.g. more time for character, more space for subplots and intertwining storylines) while eliminating the main disadvantage. It can also help combat another of the disadvantages of television, the difficulty of conveying metaphorical or multi-layered stories. Obviously, the longer you make a story the harder it becomes to maintain a central conceit, but a miniseries at least puts a limit on it that can help you make the conceit watertight. The more you stretch a metaphor, the bigger and more obvious the tiny holes in its surface become.