The Story Behind the Best Episode of ‘Girls5eva’ Season 3
There’s a lot to like about Girls5eva, whose third season premiered March 14 on its new home, Netflix. But there is just as much to envy, should you be a creative type hoping that one day you’ll get to see your own dream project realized. For creator Meredith Scardino, whose past credits include Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and The Late Show With David Letterman, bringing a comedy like this one to life is something of a dream scenario: jam-packed with references to her favorite bits of obscure, nostalgic pop culture.
“I just kept thinking, ‘What do I want to do? What would I want to see?’” Scardino says in a recent interview with The Daily Beast’s Obsessed, about coming up with the pitch for Girls5eva. “And then, eventually, I ended up here. And I was like, ‘Oh my God! I get to talk about the past!’”
That past isn’t so distant. Grils5eva boasts a fannish love for a certain era of culture in particular—that of Scardino’s own teen years, around the start of the new millennium. And in the fourth episode of the latest season, the show transposes the dreaminess of its own existence into a plot line, making for some of the most ingeniously silly, thoughtful comedy in recent years.