NBC
The latest episode of Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist is called ‘Zoey’s Extraordinary Memory’, and much of the story is about Zoey’s longing to recreate a cherished childhood moment with her dad, when they watched a meteor shower together. Alongside all that are a few subplots of various thematic relevance and meaningful impact, including some that are merely setting things up for the future.
In the most disconnected, somewhat setting up storyline, David desperately desires to be in the Aussie neighbor’s garage band, because I guess giving up his lawyer job wasn’t enough of a ‘life change’ arc for his character. He belts out ‘Drift Away’ by Dobie Gray which has the line ‘I want to get lost in your rock and roll’, and I suppose the idea is that he’s a decent keyboard player. Even if he’s a bit behind the times when he doesn’t recognize the song ‘Watermelon Sugar’ by Harry Styles — I mean it did come out in 2019 but it is the sort of thing people David’s age are less likely to know.
I don’t know that I really care about this storyline at all, maybe they can’t utilize Alice Lee as much and need a storyline for David independent of her, but this is an odd choice to say the least. There is a thematic connection though to Zoey’s story, because it’s about David’s desire to reconnect to a lost time from his youth. It’s just not so interesting and a bit clichéd at this point.
In the underlying storyline, the fake aggregation restaurant ‘MaxiMo’ finally opens, and although I still don’t get the concept (the other restaurants are just okay with this business model?) the name itself isn’t bad. It’s hard to care about how well it’s going to do, although at least we get a fun, giant number of everyone singing and dancing to Jennifer Lopez’s classic ‘Let’s Get Loud’.
Max gets a new love interest named Rose (Katie Findlay), another set-up storyline with a vague thematic connection to a bygone youth, although it also has the dark so-called ‘joke’ of a random girl saying she tried to drown herself once. It is tonally out of place with the vibe of everything else, and comes across as insensitive at best. Of course, Mo also gets a new romantic interest because obviously that’s needed, a local fire marshal (David St. Louis).
The dude is asking for safety changes in what seems to be very reasonable ways, but Mo simply must ‘flirt with anger’ in a very telegraphed, uninteresting way. The whole cliché of ‘flirting with anger’ is also a boring way to connect people, but maybe now that their meet cute is done, something interesting can happen with the two of them?
The other romantic storyline is Leif and the girl who’s totally lying to him, and suffers because Zoey gave him bad advice to go out anyway. It wasn’t that bad of advice, but she could’ve told him about Kaia’s lying behavior instead of letting him figure it out for himself. He also sings, unironically, ‘Tainted Love’ by Soft Cell, which should be a sign that it was a bad move anyway.
NBC
And Zoey’s meteor storyline is sort of in the background the whole time, and we never quite connect with it on an emotional level — instead she and a bunch of the gang (including the underwritten McKenzie) go out to go stargazing instead. Making ‘new memories’, which would hit harder if the emotional underpinning was stronger, even if the thematic storytelling felt decently handled throughout.
What I really want to see is something that’s a bit more interesting from the relationship side of things for people, especially from the very thinly written office characters. They’ve done little dips into folks like Tobin and Leif, but they still feel just like joke characters, and the jokes are always quite varying in quality. Overall, a mixed episode, kinda jumbled, but the song choices were good and the singing performances themselves well done. It’s really a mixed season so far overall.
What did you think of this episode? Start a conversation in the comments section below.
Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist airs Sundays at 9:00 PM on NBC.
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