Key to the creation of Girls5eva, the new Peacock comedy from executive producers Tina Fey and Robert Carlock and creator/showrunner Meredith Scardino, is the music. Not a shock, given that the show is about a 2000s-era girl group of performers who went their separate ways years ago, but reunite after a surprise sampling of their one big hit by a modern-day rapper leads to a potential new chance at fame.
Composer/executive producer Jeff Richmond and the producers had all previously worked together on shows like 30 Rock and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on original music, but over the course of the eight-episode first season, the writing team and Richmond collaborated on nine songs representing the ups and downs of Girls5eva’s illustrious career — but how did Richmond’s involvement work? What inspired the production of a full album’s worth of full original music? And what songs got the most stuck in everyone’s heads? Carlock and Richmond explain in the one-on-one interview below.
Collider: To start off, what was the process of writing the songs in conjunction with writing the actual story like?
ROBERT CARLOCK: From the non-songwriting part of it, I think we just knew from the go, that we wanted music to be a big part of this. I think it's inherent, obviously in Meredith's premise, and in our long-time collaboration with Jeff. We've always found reasons and ways to include original songs, and it felt like going into this, we didn't need to overthink it. They were already baked into the idea of the show.
JEFF RICHMOND: Yeah, for sure. Yeah, so from the very beginning, you just knew you're already in a world where people are going to be singing, they're about a girls group. So, it was just deciding on what kind of songs they were going to be and where the comedy was going to come from. Are they going to be this kind of looking back at the nineties as kind of misogynistic, inappropriate reference — that kind of stuff that Meredith is really good at, by the way. She is a joke writer in lyric form, as all you guys are. It's a murderer's row of comedy lyricists, when you get a Robert Carlock and a Tina Fey and a Meredith Scardino and all involved.
CARLOCK: Well, you do touch on something too, Jeff — one of the things that was a little tricky along the way, but I think Meredith struck such a great balance and Jeff as well, and then when you add in the talents of these women, is that there's always an inclination to make it joking. It was always a balance of how much of the joke is there, and things like these older kinds of songs that were making fun of how female sexuality was treated in the past — that kind of “I Kissed a Girl” sort of liveness that these women in the present are trying to cope with and overcome — there was a joke to lean into, but sometimes it was hard, right Jeff? One of the great things was okay, these lyrics are maybe a little jokey, but then Jeff and the women performing them would make them sound so good.
CARLOCK: I think there is a joke at one point about, oh, you never listen to the lyrics of these songs, and sometimes you don't because they're so catchy. But it was a weird balance to strike because we always wanted to make things funny, but that wasn't always the point of the song.
RICHMOND: Absolutely. I will say this, the music, it could all kind of just be horrible. But this group of writers and performers can make anything funny and heartfelt. [They can] take a bent lyric that's supposed to be misogynistic and horrible, and then they sing it and not only is it funny, it also kind of brings a tear to your eye. They're a fantastic group of performers.
Of course. So, in terms of the actual order of things, would there be scripts where it was like “insert song here,” or would the song be written beforehand?
RICHMOND: A little bit of both. A little bit of both, as always, I think. In the early episodes, I think there were some partial drafts of partial songs, lyric-wise, and then I’d step away and work from the beginning skeletal shape of what those initial, maybe half a verse, a couple of lines of a chorus, and then shape that. Then it would go back and then Meredith or Robert and everybody would kind of beat it out a little more lyrically. Does that sound right?
CARLOCK: Right on top of that too though — in midstream, I think this came from Peacock and was a great idea — it was really shaking out that there was at least one song per episode, and they said, well, what if over the credits we chose one of those songs to be a complete version. Which is a great idea, and a lot more work for Jeff.
RICHMOND: Really killer, which was great. The excuse we needed to actually write full-length radio versions of all these songs that we were loving, that were so short, was to say, oh yeah, you've got real estate over the credits. If you want it, we will let you have an extended version of the credits. Which is, 15-second songs take some work, but when it's two minutes and 30 seconds, there is a lot more work to do. But it also made you really have to kind of explore how to sustain a song longer than just 15 seconds. People had to put some thought into it, musically and lyrically.
So I know my answer to this question after watching all eight episodes, but I'm very curious about yours: Which song gets stuck in your head the most?
CARLOCK: Mostly “The Splingee,” which is at least is one of the pure joke ones. Right, Jeff? I mean, it's still, again, it's elevated because it's so catchy, but that's the one where they're trying to start a dance craze. That's just one of my favorite jokes, which is something that's just too long. It's too many steps. I think “The Splingee.”
RICHMOND: It's interesting. There's a bunch of earworms, I think. "4 Stars" hangs on you like that, but there is something comedically about “The Splingee,” that the only way you can sustain it is just by keep building it. You have to, not to change it. I don't know why we want to talk about “The Splingee” so much.
CARLOCK: At the end of the song, you just have to do it two more times to complete one full Splingee.
RICHMOND: At least you haven't heard the full, really full version of the song, which is really long. There's a lot... “New York Lonely Boy” hangs on you in a way that makes it feel very nostalgic in a way as well.
CARLOCK: What was yours?
Mine is in fact "Famous 5eva," and I think it's in part probably because it's using the credits and so forth, but it does give me a natural segway to ask — what's so interesting about that song to me is the fact that it's not really about relationships in a way that you would expect like their big hit to be, or any girl group’s big hit to be. Why was that the right theme for that song?
RICHMOND: Oh, that's an interesting one because that was the first song that got written and I was pushing to write it. That was one of the ones that came in with just a little bit of lyric, and I said, Meredith, this we have to expand really quickly because I have a feeling this is the song that's at least going to let the brass know that we know what we're doing. We have to write one full-length song right away, so that they go, okay, yes. Also, because that song was interesting, that was the song story-wise that has to get sampled. So you have to have that song so that the rapper, Jeremiah, can deconstruct it into a sampled version.
So we were all racing around there at the beginning, but you're right. It's not the same kind of theme. It's got that kind of teamwork, “We're a group. We have all our individual things, we have our individual verses” — which a lot of those songs did in the day, those kinds of put-together things. They were all very individual and yet they were packaged as a group.
CARLOCK: Yeah, and to that, that is the way in which it is kind of about the kind of relationship. I know you're asking about the kind of boys, boys, boys sort of relationships, but it was the group anthem about the group lasting forever. It sort of felt kind of necessarily ironic for that to be the way that the thing starts, where obviously those things don't last forever. Whatever the Spice Girls say about friendship and love, right? The show is about reassembling and recreating and taking this group of women who were put together randomly and are in this new phase of their life and this new exploration of their talent. Could they actually be friends? Because they never really were. So those kinds of relationships are what want we to put at the center of the show, and so there was sort of a conscious choice to go in that direction, rather than lead with maybe the kind of bubble gum that you expect.
Girls5Eva is streaming now on Peacock.