Apple TV+ musical comedy Schmigadoon! lets its hair down this week as Josh goes on the lam and Melissa goes on the hunt for clues. Plus, Jane Krakowski gets an MVP moment that caps a very fun outing for the cast and writers.
The musical numbers in this week’s episode, entitled “Bells and Whistles,” prove stellar. And Schmigadoon! delivers more laughs per minute than usual, which means the second season of the feather-light show totally found its groove.
Schmigadoon! recap: ‘Bells and Whistles’
Season 2, episode 3: Josh (played by Keegan-Michael Key) has broken out of jail (placed there after being accused of murdering a showgirl), thanks to his cellmate, Topher (Aaron Tveit), and his band of singing hippies.
Melissa (Cecily Strong) is heartbroken to hear it. As his lawyer, Bobbie (Jane Krakowski), tells her, it looks much worse now that Josh has fled from the law. He can protest his innocence all he wants, but he looks very guilty now.
Josh regrets breaking out, and he’s not really crazy about all these hippies, either. They start singing a song about being much freer, but he doesn’t get into the spirit. (“Everyone’s gotta get naked!” is the funniest line of the song, and Josh freaks out.)
Melissa recently landed a job at the club owned by Otavius Kratt (Patrick Page), filling in for the dead showgirl. She can’t dance, but Kratt has a crush on her, so he gave her the job anyway.
Among the dead dancer’s possessions is a datebook with an address in it. Melissa heads over there and finds an orphanage run by Miss Coldwell (Kristen Chenoweth) and a butcher shop owned by the ill-tempered Dooley Flint (Alan Cumming).
Flint is the father of Jenny Banks (Dove Cameron), the dead girl’s former roommate and Melissa’s current roommate. Kratt had Jenny’s mom/Flint’s wife killed, and sent Flint to jail for the crime. While he was gone, Kratt pressed Jenny into service as a dancer and his girlfriend.
Now, Flint wants revenge, but he hasn’t been able to reintroduce himself to his daughter since he went away. He demands that Melissa keep his existence a secret, and she agrees.
What’s not funny about hippies and dope?
Photo: Apple TV+
Eventually, Melissa finds Josh — and by the time she does, he’s high as a kite. She tries to prove to the hippies that she’s cool, but fails miserably. The hippies know about Kratt, too, and have been trying to stop him unsuccessfully.
“We’ve been getting naked and reciting parables for months and nothing has changed!” Topher says, in a sly rewrite of one of the great jokes from The Simpsons.
Melissa takes Josh back to face trial, and Bobbie’s defense is all sung and danced. (It incorporates nods to big musicals including Company, A Chorus Line, Sweet Charity and Moulin Rouge — a very impressive number.) The showstopper gets Josh acquitted. Then, he and Melissa try to leave town, but of course Kratt isn’t going to let them just walk away. It’s just a matter of how he’ll stop them.
Jane Krakowski steals the show
Photo: Apple TV+
Julie Klausner wrote this episode of Schmigadoon!, and her acidic touch is much appreciated. Josh’s initial discomfort around the hippies feels very personal and delivers a lot of the best material in the episode.
We still get the expected jokes of Josh and Melissa breaking the fourth wall when people hit them with songs and ideas culled from musicals, but they’re at least funnier here than they were in the first two episodes of the show’s second season. The little play they put on about sheep is a perfectly stupid encapsulation of not just the ludicrousness of so much of ’60s counterculture in America but the way it was portrayed on the stage and screen.
Special mention must be given to Jane Krakowski and her episode-stealing number in the third act. The wire work and roller skating, the Sondheim-cribbing last bar jammed with about 10,000 words for her to get through in 15 seconds, the seductive walk — she nails every little challenge the song throws at her without appearing to break a sweat.
… and the rest of the Schmigadoon! cast members are no slouches, either
Krakowski is hardly unheralded or anything, but it’s still great to know that she’s with writers who want to take advantage of every one of her strengths. The Schmigadoon! cast is being pretty inconsistently utilized this season, which makes sense: These are busy performers, it’s a six-episode season, and writing more than one song for so many performers takes an awful lot of work. But I’ve been most impressed by Krakowski’s commitment.
I also liked Alan Cumming’s Sweeney Todd pastiche. Cumming’s got a great singing voice that, while diametrically opposed to the register of the more famous Todds like Len Cariou or Michael Cerveris, goes beautifully with the Sondheim melody.
All in all, this week’s episode of Schmigadoon! is very, very fine outing from this cast, and a reminder why, despite not factoring centrally into Josh and Melissa’s storyline, these guys were all very carefully chosen.
★★★★☆
Watch Schmigadoon! on Apple TV+
New episodes of Schmigadoon! season two arrive every Wednesday on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-14
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper and But God Made Him A Poet: Watching John Ford in the 21st Century, the director of 30 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
