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So I think the reality of Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist is that it doesn’t realize how terrible Max has been acting. All throughout the episode, essentially everything Max did was a check in the box ‘Yup, he’s awful now’. He starts by incentivizing a cheesy handshake and calling himself a manager, while Leif explicitly calls him a good manager. In contrast, we’ve seen Zoey legitimately work well with her team, not just this surface platitude.
Later on, as Leif sings (out loud) ‘I’m All Out of Love’ by Air Supply, Max angrily and smugly sings ‘Bye Bye Bye’ by N’Sync to Zoey as an ‘I”m over you’ tale, which certainly doesn’t endear him anymore to me. Zoey correctly notes in the beginning of the episode that yes, he’s still mad at her for supporting his career growth two floors up in the same building.
After Joan and Ava finally agree to work together on their chirp project (which makes sense, considering it’s supposed to be a new flagship product for the whole company), they sing the classic ’60s song ‘Get Together’ by The Youngbloods, which of course is all about people working it out. And we finally get to hear Renée Elise Goldsberry belt it, a bit of an unfair contrast to the less professional singers in the cast.
Sure, soon after Mo compares her desire to break up with Eddie to the same thing with Max — Zoey is also correct that it’s not even remotely the same thing. Mo’s song of ‘Issues’ by Julia Michaels is just another ‘I love you but this is difficult’ song, but Eddie has never really been much more than a decent guy without much in the way of an interesting personality. It’s more of an issue that we can see Mo making a mistake than really caring about Eddie in particular.
So sure, Max and Zoey reconcile in a way at the end of the episode, but then he’s fired — and are we supposed to be dismayed by it? Let’s be honest here, Ava, Joan, Max, the president of the company — they’re all terrible in different ways. Joan is the best she’s ever been in this episode expressing empathy to Zoey over her grief and understanding that some things are more important than work.
NBC
The title of the episode is ‘Zoey’s Extraordinary Mother’, and the main arc is Maggie getting some sort of acceptance not of the loss, but that she will have to get on the ‘grief train’ as Deb (cameo of Bernadette Peters) explains. The other cameo was Paul Feig as the funeral director, and … okay? I mean, he’s often amusing, but this was an odd place to try that sort of thing.
The other songs were ‘We Gotta Get Out of This Place’ by The Animals, sung en masse by all of the funeral home patrons, which was naturally on the nose, and Deb singing ‘Feeling Good’ by Nina Simone. That song didn’t really make sense — the way it was first staged, it seemed that she was celebrating the death of someone.
After all of the later conversations, it seems to be that she’s in a good place about her loss, but I think it’s an odd, maybe even inappropriate choice of a song. I think it might be the worst choice the show has ever made.
Still, I think they handled the discussion with Deb and Maggie well, and if that’s the central message of the episode, I can support that. Understanding that grief is a personal burden, and you cannot stand in the way of the train. It’s a good lesson, and empathetic one, and it’s the sort of thing I’m glad to see about the show amidst all of the nonsense and misunderstanding of some of its characters. At least Zoey still feels right.
Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist airs Sundays at 9:00 PM on NBC.
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