Girls5Eva is back for its third fabulous season, and this time around, it's Gay with a capital G!
Back in 2022, the Tiny Fey-produced comedy about members of a '90s girl band trying to recapture the fame they had when they were young was almost canceled before Netflix stepped in to save it.
The show is a hilarious send-up of '90s and early 2000s pop culture, full of bedazzled costumes, campy acting, and parodies of pop music icons — in short, it was made for the gays.
"If you get the gays you get everyone!" Girls5Evastar Busy Philipps tells PRIDE in an exaggerated voice reminiscent of her character Summer.
"I just can't believe that so many gay people are loving the show and that I get to be a gray-haired, you know, dentist, lesbian character that's a pop star," Paula Pell, who plays Gloria and is out in real life, chimes in.
This season, the four ladies — played by Philipps, Pell, Renée Elise Goldsberry, and Sara Bareilles — are still trying to climb the ladder toward fame and fortune as they deal with dating woes, family drama, secret identities, and comically evil Christian fundamentalists.
One of the funniest running gags of the season is Gloria's somewhat disastrous dating life. She has a spreadsheet of the different types of women she wants to try and sleep with before settling down again, and when things don't go as planned, she starts caring for sick animals to sublimate her emotions to hilarious results. "Now she's on this kind of mad dash to set up her life to have real, authentic, queer joy and domestic joy and all that, but she just wants to make sure that she's not going to get into it again with her ex and have missed something that might even make her feel even more joy," Pell explains.
While the show is laugh-out-loud funny, it's also about the strength of female friendships in the face of adversity and a celebration of hot, hilarious women in their 40s and 50s who don't have life figured out yet.
"I'm grateful that there's something that I've been a part of making that makes me feel a little less crazy as I try to navigate all that I don't know and haven't figured out about this business and the world and all those things," Goldsberry says. "Trying and failing and trying again with people I love is my greatest chance for any bit of joy, and so I'm grateful that this show is an example of that."
Part of that is the freedom, Bareilles says, that comes from letting go of trying to solve life like a puzzle with only one solution.
"It's an amazing thing to embrace the idea that like what if you don't have to have it figured out," she says. "What if you just embrace this idea that you're just trying and we're always all just trying? And I just think there's a lot of liberation in that because there isn't some version where you've moved all of the pieces on the checkerboard just so that everything works out. That's not the way life works."
"That you've made it," Philipps agrees.
"Yes, there is no arrival," Bareilles continues. "You're always in progress."
While critics lauded the show's first two seasons, it needed to pull in a bigger audience to keep it off the chopping block. However, the new season is charming, heartfelt, and hits right comedic notes, so hopefully, it will find new life on Netflix.
The first two seasons and all six episodes of season 3 of Girls5Eva are now available to stream on Netflix.
Watch the trailer below.
