What Made Galavant Work?
An ode to a show that did not give a single fuck.
We’re too caught up in trying to reinvent the wheel here.
Consider Frozen II, the highly anticipated follow up to Disney’s surprise smash hit - an ambitious adventure that tried to comment on everything from identity to depression to colonialism, and ultimately fell flat with audiences. Daring conceptually and thematically, sure, but too bloated and unfocused to be satisfying. (There is a whooooole conversation to be had about that janky dam plotline, but it is not the conversation I’m prepared to have today.) It felt like less of a story and more a 150 million dollar response to the perceived simplicity of fairy tale stories - this ain’t your mama’s Frozen!
Sometimes…and hear me out…art can just thrive on being good at what it’s trying to do.
Galavant’s cancellation in 2016 wasn’t necessarily a surprise to anyone - it had been renewed along with Agent Carter, another fan favorite, in an attempt by former ABC president Paul Lee to push content with the potential for long-term success. (Long term success not being a term we can apply to Lee, either, considering his ousting just after Galavant’s second season wrapped up.) It cultivated a strong enough fanbase to facilitate a movement to save the show a la Brooklyn Nine Nine(including future “Guardian of the Nine Nine” Mark Hamill) but has since enjoyed life as a cult classic on Netflix.
And really, we can’t pretend that Galavant was a perfect show. The second season, while good if not better than the first in some areas, did split up its core trio for the majority of its run; the spitfire, kitchen sink style comedy meant that not every joke landed, and neither did every single one of its three-to-four songs an episode. But when the jokes were good, they were really good (The “Forest of Coincidence” sequence is required viewing, with or without context) and even the weakest songs were bolstered by a playful sense of humor and sandwiched by better songs within their own episodes - “Different Kind of Princess,” the only song in the show I would label as “bad,” has the additional misfortune of appearing alongside “Dwarves vs Giants,” a fun West Side Story sendup, and series highlight “My Dragon Pal and Me”.
From the outset, it’s a pretty basic fairy-tale pastiche - a gallant hero sets out to save his love from a wicked king forcing her into marriage, only for the story to flip within literally five minutes and turn its hero into an egotistical glory hound, its fair maiden into a power-hungry tyrant, and its villain into a hapless dope who is completely clueless as to why the people of the country he invaded and pillaged don’t exactly like him. The premise of Galavant getting his groove back really just serves as a framework for the cavalcade of goofs the show has to offer - wizards with names like Xanax and Neo of Sporin, a crew of beached pirates who’ve taken up sustainable gardening, magical gay bars - all punctuated by raucous musical numbers from Disney scribes Alan Menken and Glenn Slater, the team behind Tangled.
(Side tangent - while it doesn’t commit to the Galavant model of multiple songs per episode, or even a song for every episode, Rapunzel’s Tangled Adventure has a few fun echoes of Menken and Slater’s Galavant songbook: “Listen Up,” “Buddy Song,” and “Stronger Than Ever Before” are all lively, lighthearted numbers sprinkled in amongst power ballads such as “Waiting in the Wings,” the song that finally got Menken into the EGOT pantheon.)
But what makes the show such a solid watch is that it doesn’t sacrifice interesting character growth in the name of making more jokes - I mean, the characters don’t grow much (with one exception, and we’re getting to him) but their relationships with their goals and with one another change enough that when the show closes up shop, you’re happy to have spent the time with them. The lovers are united, the underdogs have had their shots at glory, and the world is a better place than it was before. Sure, it’s basic, but the rest of the show was un-basic enough that an unironic happy ending didn’t feel boring. It left a few interesting hooks dangling on the off chance it didn’t get cancelled (though part of the show’s charm was predicated on the fact that they sort of knew they were always pushing cancellation, to the point where the second season’s first episode is literally called “A New Season AKA Suck It Cancellation Bear” and opens with a song about how not even they can believe they got renewed) but it put all of its main characters in a position where you’re sad to see them go, but not dissatisfied with how they leave.
Consider the series’ best character, King Richard, played by Timothy Omundson with the perfect balance of lovable hamminess and genuine pathos. The show is quick to establish that he has lofty dreams of being a powerful, ruthless king - and losing his virginity - but is too damn clueless to realize that he’s largely disliked by his subjects, his servants, and his queen, who’s boinking every other guy in the castle. Throughout the first season, his loyal knight Gareth (Vinnie Jones, a consistent scene stealer) tries to toughen his resolve and get him to fight his own battles, but when Richard finally takes the initiative, it’s at the worst possible moment, forcing Gareth to intervene one last time and send him away for his own safety. From then on, Richard is forced to grapple with his own inadequacies for the first time in his life, facing the fact that he has no real friends or accomplishments to speak of without a crown or a castle. He, like his (bearded) dragon companion Tad Cooper, isn’t taken very seriously by anybody - but he learns to super believe in himself strongly enough to take up arms for what he believes in, and earn his own ascent to greatness after losing everything, even while remaining as dopey and clueless as ever. “The best ruler might be someone who doesn’t want to rule,” indeed.
Speaking of Game of Thrones, it helps that the show is just about willing to make meta jokes about everything, from overused narrative devices to the conventions of the musical genre to its on-air competition at the time - including Thrones, a frequent target of the show by nature of them both being genre-bending fantasy television with medieval settings. From directional signs pointing towards Winterfell and the Red Keep to the show’s location being somewhere within “the Seven Realms” as opposed to Thrones’ “Seven Kingdoms” to Kingsley, a K-Mart Tywin Lannister who appears in the back half of the first season to seize Richard’s crown before being summarily killed off by Mad Queen Madalena, Galavant constantly dances around the idea that there’s better medieval fantasy on tv, but for some reason, you’re watching this one.
(“Better” being subjective now that hindsight’s 20/20 - maybe Lee was onto something with that whole push for shows with the potential for long term success. All I’m saying is, the Jon/Dany dynamic wants what the Gareth/Madalena dynamic had.)
And yet, Galavant’s core strength is that playfulness and irreverence: the philosophy that nothing is above mockery, including itself. The tired “miscommunication leads to one half of a romantic duo believing the other no longer loves them” plotline is introduced under ridiculous pretenses and thoroughly derided until its resolution (there are only so many contrivances that can lead to one character believing another wants them to “die in a brown fart”) - and while, yes, they are still doing it, it’s clear that the only reason they deployed the trope at all was to mine it for laughs. Not every show can get away with that, but Galavant is so dedicated to its own goofiness that it always makes you feel as though you’re in on the joke, rather than watching the writers pat themselves on the back for how much smarter they are than other writers.
In the end, it joined the upper echelons of shows axed before their time by nature of trying to be a good product versus a crowd-pleasing product that could constantly generate buzz, a currency which was not yet as necessary to survive on television as it is now. It’s not quite as daring or innovative as some of its peers, but it didn’t set out to be, and was better for it: sometimes a show just wants to put people in period clothes and have them sing silly songs to bearded dragons.
