Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist :: Zoey’s Extraordinary Confession

NBC

The most recent episode of Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist is called ‘Zoey’s Extraordinary Confession’, which certainly seems to be related to Zoey finally telling her theoretical best friend Max about her ‘superpower’, which she accurately describes as ‘X-Men meets The Voice’. Her magical capability has always been a little Michigan J. Frog, only showing up at certain times, and it’s also often been representing something obvious.

The show has never really been able to reproduce the more surprising singing reveals of the first episode, although some episodes have had decent attempts. This time, the least interesting and most silly choice was ‘A Little Less Conversation’ by Elvis, sung by Zoey’s mom because she was tired of her fighting with her brother about the whole pregnant wife thing.

That song is actually sort of inappropriate here, because it’s only about wanting less conversation in terms of something between lovers. It’s one of those cases of the show being literal with song titles or choruses, or even the tone, which feels a little easy and maybe even a little lazy, like they just want to shove a few more songs into the episode without spending more time on the meaning behind it.

Of course, another issue there is that the Zoey/Zoey’s Brother conflict was immediately resolved without anything further, making it less of a real interesting storyline. The show did do something interesting by having Max do a real flash mob song of ‘If I Can’t Have You’ by Shawn Mendes that confuses the situation with Zoey. Now, cute subversion aside, it’s an infuriating thing for Max to put on Zoey. That’s way too much public pressure, it’s a public declaration of love!

I didn’t even remotely feel like Max played it at all right, so Zoey’s apologetic efforts felt completely unbalanced and I didn’t think she did anything wrong in the first place. Flash mobs were passé nine years ago when it was used as a silly conceit in adequate rom-com Friends with Benefits. It’s not any less awkward or ridiculous now. At the very least, it led to Max understanding about Zoey’s superpower, which is more of an interesting angle to take in the future.

NBC

The next song was one of the obvious ones (meaning it’s clear to us the audience about it), Tobin singing ‘Don’t Speak’ by No Doubt. The Tobin/Leif storyline is an odd one, because the two have just been background comedy so far, and this episode doesn’t really serve to endear them to us much more. Tobin does express a bit of realness later, but he’s still a bit of a flat character. The other obvious one was ‘Bailamos’ by Enrique Iglesias, where Mo sings with the new special someone in the club, another ‘Let’s toss in a song’ case.

Finally there was ‘I Put a Spell on You’ by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, between Leif and the boss. She’s right that it’s inappropriate and a power imbalance, so I guess that’s a potential area of conflict going forward. Not really my favorite storyline either, the young dude with the older female authority figure because it’s something of a reversal. Either way, it’s not a great real life move, so we’ll see how well the show handles it.

All that aside, there were a lot of funny moments and lines: Zoey’s ‘I bid you good day’, and Tobin in general, especially his line ‘Rumor has it, they like sex’. So it was still a fun episode even if there was a lot that I was a little unsure about. The show isn’t really doing ‘Problem of the Week’ anymore, so it really needs to have something that connects more than a few amusing lines.

Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist airs Sundays at 9:00 PM on NBC.

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