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      HBO Max's 'Gossip Girl' Sashays Into a New World

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      A new version of the teen drama arrives Thursday on HBO Max, still glamorous but also reflective of changed attitudes toward wealth and privilege.On a sultry June morning, a small battalion of camera operators, production assistants, and hair and makeup pros descended on a subway entrance on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. An assistant director barked a command and suddenly the ordinary commuters vanished, replaced by glam pedestrians attired in kicky fall fashion. Shoes gleamed, teeth glinted, each ponytail and pompadour shone. In an instant, a traffic median had transformed into a sweat-free space of sparkle, scandal, possibility. Spotted at 72nd and Broadway: “Gossip Girl,” back again. XOXO. More

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      TV Is Full of Stories About Creative Work — Minus the Work Part

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      HBO’s “Hacks” is more interested in its characters’ personalities than their output. But plenty of great stories have been told about the creative process itself.The premise of HBO’s smart hit comedy “Hacks,” just finished with its first season and renewed for a second, is that a played-out older Las Vegas comedian, Deborah Vance, ends up paired with a canceled and unemployable Gen Z comic, who is meant to help her write new material. Both of them view the association as beneath them. Deborah has always written her own material. Ava, who shows up for the job without even researching her new employer’s work, smarts under the perception that Deborah doesn’t regard her as very talented.When, in the second episode, a flat tire leaves them stranded in the desert, Ava begins to complain that Deborah is making the job unnecessarily hard, even though Ava is “good.” Deborah, regally outfitted in a flowing robe and parasol, responds coldly. “Good is the minimum,” she says. “It’s the baseline. You have to be so much more than good.” Even if you’re great, she says — and even if you’re lucky — you still have to work, and hard, “and even that is not enough.” Deborah doesn’t respect her new employee because Ava has done nothing to earn that respect and has in fact done much to discourage it. She then abandons Ava in the desert.Deborah may be a highhanded, abusive boss, but she is also right. Watching this show, though, you sometimes wonder if it believes her. Like most shows about creative endeavors, “Hacks” commits to the idea that its characters are hustlers: Deborah, in particular, is ruthless when it comes to keeping her Vegas time slots. But one thing that is rarely on the table in shows like this is real failure. (Deborah might lose her slots, and Ava her job, but we’ve seen enough of these stories to suspect those would only be stages on the way to their eventual success.) And despite Deborah’s speech, one thing we rarely see her and Ava do is actual work, hard or otherwise. They bounce jokes off each other, briefly, in the first episode, and Ava pitches Deborah a few times. We see Deborah’s standup, but aren’t offered much insight into her process. We barely see Ava’s work at all. These women are in comedy, but for all it matters to the show, they might as well be in car sales. At least in a show about a dealership, you would see them sell some cars.Taking failure off the table, rarely depicting creative work — these are linked choices, and in making them, “Hacks” is hardly alone. Even outside the realm of TV and film, you find things like Sally Rooney’s novel “Conversations With Friends,” about a poet whose poetry never appears in the book; everybody says she’s great, and we’re left to imagine why. You wouldn’t watch “Rocky” and expect to see neither training nor boxing, but in stories about artists, it’s typical to relocate all the struggle, all the drama, into the protagonists’ personal lives. They are blocked creatively because they are blocked personally. Or they are fine creatively, but personal conflict erupts right before the big show and pours out in their performance. The work, the talent, is a given. The story is elsewhere.“Hacks” is not centrally concerned with the business of show business. Its biggest story lines involve changes in gender politics and tastes — in comedy, but not only comedy — across generations. The show that Ava eventually pushes Deborah to write sounds personal, confessional, more like Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette” than a Vegas comedy set. But we never see it; we’re only told it bombed, which might have been interesting to watch. Ava’s other major intervention is accusing Deborah of not sticking up for other women, which leads to a scene in which Deborah lectures a male heckler, then pays him $1.69 million to never again enter a comedy club. “Hacks” can get away with this — can avoid showing its characters developing their work — because we accept the premise that they are both talented. If it wanted to suggest they were bad or mediocre at what they do, we would have to see it.They assert that failure lies at the heart of all art, and that any story about art is a story about progressive failures.There are works out there about people who are artistic failures. Some have no talent, while others just have no luck. In the first two minutes of Elaine May’s “Ishtar,” we watch the two protagonists writing a song together, testing out lines, discarding what works and keeping what doesn’t. They do this throughout the movie, even in life-or-death situations, because writing songs is what they care about. The joke is that they are fine-tuning songs that are incredibly, unsalvageably bad, working toward an ideal of aesthetic perfection shared by nobody but them. This creative process is faithfully recreated by May, step by painful step, because the movie is ultimately about two guys who will never be what they want: great songwriters.In Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood,” we watch the titular director of comically hokey B-movies as he crafts “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” famous in some circles as the “worst movie ever.” Unlike May, Burton doesn’t leave the question of why Wood’s movies are so bad as a kind of holy mystery. They’re bad because Wood doesn’t attend to his actual work: He buzzes with such enthusiasm that he films one take of everything, no matter how bad. Like “Ishtar,” the film celebrates this delusional commitment by structuring itself as if it were the story of an artist who eventually won acclaim — and, like “Ishtar,” it revolves around people who are difficult to root for, not because they are unlikable but because they are incompetent. The opposite may be true for Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” in which Rupert Pupkin gets on TV by kidnapping a TV talk-show host. The big twist is that his routine is actually pretty funny; he’s just an unlikable guy whose name nobody can remember.The reason these movies are outliers is pretty simple: They were all bombs. (In the case of “Ishtar,” a bomb of such infamous proportions as to become a punchline for decades.) But by putting artistic struggle at their core, they assert that failure lies at the heart of all art and that any story about art is a story about progressive failures. Like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner, failure chases something it will never have. But would we know anything about the Road Runner without it?Television shows dedicated to creative work, and creative failure, are harder to find. There was “30 Rock,” about a sketch-comedy show that was, pretty clearly, hacky, unfunny and poorly run. And yes, there’s probably only so much time audiences can be expected to spend watching people tinker with songs or jokes — but other kinds of television have figured out how to mix personal drama with the actual work of their characters. There’s no reason we can’t see Deborah and Ava working together; we just don’t. “Hacks” is meant to be a show about women and the work they do that goes unrecognized. But that work seems to be recognized least of all by the show. It would have been a crazy thing to dedicate an episode to Deborah’s routine and its failure to land. But it would have supplied the missing piece of her partnership with Ava. It would have been a crazy thing, but it would have made a better show, too. Source photographs: Screen grabs from HBO MaxB.D. McClay is a critic, an essayist and a contributing editor at The Hedgehog Review and a contributing writer at Commonweal. More

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      In ‘Monsters at Work,’ the Scary Part Is the New Business Model

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      Twenty years after Pixar debuted the original “Monsters, Inc.,” Disney+ is bringing a cast of new monsters to the small screen — and putting Mike and Sulley in the managers’ office.You’ve got to feel sorry for Tylor Tuskmon.After finishing at the top of his university class and receiving the business career offer of his dreams, Tylor arrives for his first workday to find that the company’s chief executive has just been jailed. The new leaders have adopted a radically novel approach and no longer need his furiously studied, exquisitely honed talent. He’s going to have to start at the bottom — literally — with the basement maintenance crew. More

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      Delia Fiallo, Master of the Telenovela, Is Dead at 96

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      She wrote more than 40 telenovelas, the American soap opera’s addictive cousin, and was one of the most celebrated names in Spanish-language television.Delia Fiallo, the Cuban-born television writer known throughout Latin America as the “mother of the telenovela,” the addictively melodramatic Spanish-language cousin to the American soap opera, died on Tuesday at her home in Coral Gables, Fla. She was 96.Her daughter Delia Betancourt confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Every fan of the genre knew what to expect: Gypsy maidens. Wicked stepmothers. Wealthy, handsome male heirs. Amnesia, fictional illnesses, mistaken identities, misplaced babies. And at the center of it all, a young and beautiful woman who was often an orphan, but always from a humble background, and with whom the well-born young man would fall madly in love — though the couple would be thwarted through all sorts of swirling Shakespearean complications (murder, faked pregnancies, love triangles, those conniving stepmothers) before coming together in a happy ending, 200 or so episodes later. (American soap operas go on forever, with an unending cast of characters. The telenovela works itself out in under a year, with a finite cast of characters. Mostly, they end happily.)“The essential theme of a novela is the story of a love that is obstructed,” Ms. Fiallo told Variety in 1996. “A couple meet, fall in love, suffer obstacles in being able to fulfill that love and at the end reach happiness.” She added, “If you don’t make the public cry, you won’t achieve anything.”Ms. Fiallo was a master of that operatic, weepy form. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, she wrote more than 40 telenovelas, most of which were produced in Venezuela and then adapted (often by Ms. Fiallo herself) and televised all over the world (and continued to be shown long after her last original drama, a blockbuster called “Cristal,” first aired in 1985). In Bosnia, pirated versions of “Kassandra” — which she adapted from a show originally called “Peregrina,” about a Gypsy maiden who falls in love with, well, you know — were so popular that when the series went off the air in 1998 it caused an international incident. The State Department intervened, pleading with the distributor of the series to donate all 150 episodes to maintain the peace in a small Bosnian town riven by political factions but united over its love of the show.“I want my ‘Kassandra,’” The New York Times reported at the time, “became a complaint of many ordinary Bosnians.”While Ms. Fiallo’s Cinderella stories were global successes, it was in the Americas that they resonated the most.In the United States, three generations of Latin American families often wept together in a nightly ritual that’s hard to imagine today. “You watched what your family watched, every day for weeks and months,” said Ana Sofía Peláez, the Cuban American writer and activist, whose fluency in Spanish came in large part from sobbing with her Cuban-born grandfather through years of Fiallo dramas like “Cristal,” “Esmerelda” and “Topacio.” She recalled both of them losing it when Luis (the wealthy stepson of the head of a modeling agency that is the plot pivot of “Cristal”) sang “Mi Vida Eres Tu” — “You Are My Life” — to his beloved Cristal (the orphaned model whose ruthless boss turns out to be her biological mother).“The essential theme of a novela is the story of a love that is obstructed,” Ms. Fiallo once said. “If you don’t make the public cry, you won’t achieve anything.”Leila Macor/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“My grandfather and I were raised in different countries,” Ms. Pelaez said. “We had different frames of reference. But we found the same things romantic, and we were transported by those stories together.“We were all in,” she continued. “It was a shared experience that I didn’t appreciate at the time but I value so much today. It was a pan-Latin experience. Her shows were Venezuelan. But my parents would say proudly, ‘Of course, pero es Cubana’: She is a Cuban writer.”Delia Fiallo was born on July 4, 1924, in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, the only child of Felix Fiallo de la Cruz, a doctor, and Maria Ruiz. The family moved often, from small country town to small country town, and Delia, shy and bookish, began writing stories to combat her loneliness.She majored in philosophy at the University of Havana, and in 1948, the year she graduated, won a prestigious literary prize for one of her short stories. She edited a magazine for the Cuban Ministry of Education, worked in public relations and wrote radionovelas — the precursor to the telenovelas that arrived with television in Cuba in the 1950s — all at the same time, before turning to the form that would make her famous.In Cuba before the revolution, that form flourished thanks to the sponsorship of companies like Colgate-Palmolive, said June Carolyn Erlick, the editor of ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America, and the author of “Telenovelas in Pan-Latino Context,” (2018). Writers like Ms. Fiallo honed its central themes: “Love, sex, death, the usual.”Ms. Fiallo met her future husband, Bernardo Pascual, the director of a radio station and a television actor, when they were both working in radio. They married in 1952. (Their daughter Delia said it was love at first sight, just like in one of her stories: “She told herself, ‘That man is going to be mine, ese hombre va a ser mío.’”) After the couple moved to Miami in 1966, Mr. Pascual worked in construction and then started a company that built parking garages. “The family joke is that in exile Bernardo passed from the arts to the concrete,” Ms. Fiallo told The Miami Herald in 1987.Ms. Fiallo first tried to sell her scripts in Puerto Rico, for $15 an episode, but Venezuelan broadcasters offered her four times as much; to prepare, she immersed herself in the culture of Venezuela, a country she barely knew, by reading novels and interviewing Venezuelan exchange students in Miami to learn the local idioms.She took her themes from the news, but also from romance classics like “Wuthering Heights.” She often tackled social issues — rape, divorce, addiction — which meant often butting heads with the censors. A late-1960s drama, “Rosario,” a sympathetic exploration of the trauma of divorce, was suspended for a time by the Venezuelan government. In 1984, the government threatened to cancel “Leonela” if Ms. Fiallo didn’t kill off one of its characters, a woman who was a drug addict.“Some friends say I could have chosen a more literary genre,” Ms. Fiallo told The Miami Herald. “But this is what I feel most comfortable with. You can touch more people this way than with any book. Novelas are full of emotions, and emotions are the common denominator of humanity.”In the late 1980s, as many as 100 million viewers in the Americas and Europe tuned in to watch episodes of Ms. Fiallo’s shows. Her fans were devoted to her characters and their odysseys, and they often called her at home — her phone number was listed — to discuss plot lines. One fan, claiming she did not have long to live, begged Ms. Fiallo to reveal one story’s ending.“The fans are passionate about the characters,” she said in 1987. “I would be embarrassed to have my number not listed. I don’t think it would be quite fair.”In addition to her daughter Ms. Betancourt, Ms. Fiallo is survived by three other daughters, Jacqueline Gonzalez, Maria Monzon and Diana Cuevas; a son, Bernardo Pascual; 13 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Pascual died in 2019.“I consider myself successful if I can deliver to viewers a world of fantasy, even if only for an hour,” Ms. Fiallo told The Miami Herald in 1993. “Everyone is young at heart. Illusions don’t fade with time, and it is beautiful to rekindle a love affair, even if it’s not your own.” More

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      Whitney Peak Has Fun on the ‘Gossip Girl’ Reboot

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      The teenage actress is also a brand ambassador for Chanel.Name: Whitney PeakAge: 18Hometown: Born in Uganda and raised in Port Coquitlam, a city outside Vancouver, British Columbia.Now Lives: in a loft apartment in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn.Claim to Fame: A teenage actress who first made her mark playing small but pivotal roles in Aaron Sorkin’s “Molly’s Game” and “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina,” Ms. Peak stars in the reboot of “Gossip Girl.” She is a fan of the original teenage soap opera, and the glimpse of the privileged life it provided. “I just loved seeing people complain about things that were so outside of my world,” she said. “It was so ridiculous, but at the same time so good. And now that I’m living in New York, I catch myself complaining about something like that. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, I’m doing it!’”Olivia Galli for The New York TimesBig Break: In 2015, Ms. Peak was doing background work on the TV series “Minority Report” when she was cast as the younger version of Lara Vega, played by Meagan Good. A co-star, Colin Lawrence, was so impressed that he connected her to his agency, Play Management. “For the longest time, acting was just this little thing that I did on the side, a little hobby,” she said. Things shifted, however, when she started acting classes. “That’s when I stopped looking at it as a hobby and as something I’m actually interested in.”Latest Project: The new “Gossip Girl” is a modern riff on the original from the early aughts, with a new cast of characters populating the hallowed halls of Constance Billard, a tony prep school on the Upper East Side. Ms. Peak, who got the role after just one audition, plays Zoya Lott, a new girl with a secret that is set to upend the school’s social hierarchy. “She’s very young and a little bit naïve,” Ms. Peak said.Next Thing: Ms. Peak was recently named a brand ambassador for Chanel. “There’s such a maturity and sophistication about Chanel, but I have fun with the idea of making it look street style,” she said. “That’s so sick.”Pajama Party: Ms. Peak has a more casual approach to style in real life. “If I need to clear my head or I just want dessert, my friend and I will, in our pajamas, walk over to this bakery, Martha’s,” she said. “They have this gluten-free chocolate fudge cake that is out of this world.” More

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      Watch These 11 Titles Before They Leave Netflix This Month

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      Plenty to catch up on before a slew of titles leave for U.S. viewers by the end of July. These are the ones most worth seeing.Oscar winners and family favorites lead this month’s parade of titles departing from Netflix in the United States, along with an unnerving indie thriller, an immortal Australian franchise starter, a beloved ’90s rom-com and a controversial Stanley Kubrick classic. (Dates reflect the final day a title is available.)‘The Iron Lady’ (July 5)Meryl Streep picked up her third Academy Award for this 2011 portrait of the former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and it’s a stunning transformation. (The film’s makeup team also won Oscars for their work). But Streep’s performance is no mere impersonation; she digs deep into the complicated personality of the conservative stateswoman and the inconsistencies (some might say hypocrisies) she personified. Abi Morgan’s inventively structured screenplay jettisons the expected cradle-to-grave construction, dramatizing instead her life in a series of flashbacks inspired by both her grief and Alzheimer’s disease. Jim Broadbent is warm and winning as her husband.Stream it here‘The Invitation’ (July 7)What would you do if your good friends — people you have known for years, trusted and loved — joined a cult? How would you react if they welcomed you into their home, sat you down in their living room and began forcibly explaining why you should join, too? That’s the question at the heart of this gripping thriller from the director Karyn Kusama (“Girlfight”), in which a young man (Logan Marshall-Green) is invited to the home of his ex-wife (Tammy Blanchard) for a reunion and dinner party that takes a decidedly dark turn. The thriller elements are sharp, but its provocative central conundrum — How to get through to friends who’ve seemingly lost touch with reality? — has grown only more pointed in the years since its early 2016 release.Stream it herePrincess Tiana (voiced by Anika Noni Rose)and the frog Prince Naveen (Bruno Campos) in “The Princess and the Frog.”Walt Disney Animation Studios‘The Princess and the Frog’ (July 15)Disney’s 49th animated feature was also the first with an African-American “Disney princess” — a long-overdue gesture but a welcome one nevertheless. It wasn’t just a surface alteration; the directors Ron Clements and John Musker adapted the classic children’s fairy tale “The Frog Prince” to New Orleans of the 1920s, taking full advantage of Bayou culture with memorable, ragtime-style songs (by Randy Newman) and delightful updates to the original story. Anika Noni Rose voices Tiana, a waitress and chef whose dream of owning her own restaurant is interrupted by a witch doctor’s spell that turns her — and her perspective suitor, a fun-loving prince — into frogs. Oprah Winfrey, John Goodman, Keith David and Terrence Howard are highlights of the impressive voice cast.Stream it here‘The Croods’ (July 28)One of the last remaining prehistoric families finds their methods of survival — and thus, their entire way of life — challenged in this frisky, funny animated comedy. Nicolas Cage, an actor so operatically expressive that it’s shocking he hasn’t done more animated work, is both amusing and empathetic as the patriarch of the Crood family, who will go to any length to keep his family safe; Emma Stone is a delightful counterpoint as his teenage daughter, who, like most rebellious teens, is just looking to break the boredom. Ryan Reynolds, Catherine Keener and Clark Duke charm in supporting roles, but the scene stealer is Cloris Leachman, hilarious as the family’s fierce grandmother.Stream it here‘Spotlight’ (July 30)The Academy Award winner for best picture of 2015 is an “All the President’s Men”-style chronicle of investigative journalism at its most urgent. Telling the true story of how the team at the Boston Globe unearthed widespread sexual abuse by Catholic priests, the director Tom McCarthy focuses on the nuts and bolts of the journalism — how each isolated tip and victim leads to another, and another, and another. A flawless ensemble cast (including Michael Keaton, John Slattery, Liev Schreiber, Stanley Tucci and the Oscar nominees Mark Ruffalo and Rachel McAdams) runs the full emotional gamut, from skeptical and cautious to fiery and impassioned; the results are gripping, intelligent and powerful.Stream it hereMalcolm McDowell in “A Clockwork Orange.”Warner Bros.‘A Clockwork Orange’ (July 31)Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 adaptation of the Anthony Burgess novel would become his most controversial film, a dark and disturbing examination of violence (and its glamorization) that refuses to let viewers off the hook. Kubrick’s dynamic direction puts us uncomfortably close to the thrill crimes of its protagonists, a group of youthful hooligans in a vaguely futuristic Britain led by the charismatic Alex (Malcolm McDowell, at the top of his game). The picture’s ultraviolence and pitch-black humor proved so upsetting to viewers that the director took it out of circulation in England for decades; the passage of more than a half century has done little to blunt its force.Stream it here‘Hook’ (July 31)The pitch for this 1991 adventure — Steven Spielberg directing a follow-up to “Peter Pan” with Robin Williams as an adult Peter and Dustin Hoffman as Captain Hook — seemed so irresistible, such a perfect confluence of elements, that when the results were somewhat uneven, critics (and some audiences) dismissed it outright. But talk to anyone who was a child when “Hook” was released, and you’ll hear a different story, about an endlessly rewatched favorite. And children, lest we forget, were the target audience, as evidenced by the film’s eye-popping color palate, youthful supporting cast and firm embrace of the magic of imagination.Stream it here‘Jupiter Ascending’ (July 31)Every single film by the Wachowskis is a big swing, even when they’re crafting such seemingly safe bets as a television adaptation (“Speed Racer”), an adaptation of a best-selling novel (“Cloud Atlas”) or a follow-up to an earlier hit (the “Matrix” sequels). They can’t help but take risks, even when silliness or audience alienation is at stake. And if this big-canvas fantasy adventure isn’t quite a home run — the narrative pieces don’t quite fit together, and the performances are tonally disparate — the sheer ambition of its creators is as overwhelming as ever, and it is refreshing to see big-budget filmmaking that so stubbornly refuses to play by the rules.Stream it here‘Mad Max’ (July 31)Before the massive production of “Fury Road,” or even the rough-and-tumble “The Road Warrior,” the Australian director George Miller introduced the action legend “Mad” Max Rockatansky in this lean, mean slab of “Oz-ploitation” filmmaking. And he introduced a little-known Aussie actor named Mel Gibson in the title role, a police officer in a crumbling society who becomes a bloodthirsty vigilante after a criminal gang attacks his wife and child. A first-time director, Miller was working with a tiny budget and limited resources. But his talent for genre filmmaking was already evident; the metal-crunching car chases are staged with jittery ingenuity, while the emotional beats are brutally effective.Stream it here‘My Best Friend’s Wedding’ (July 31)When Julia Roberts headlined this 1997 romantic comedy, it was framed as a comeback vehicle, implying that she had wandered too far from her bread and butter with appearances in darker fare like “Mary Reilly” and “Michael Collins.” But this was no lightweight rom-com; the director P.J. Hogan (“Muriel’s Wedding”) and the screenwriter Ronald Bass (“Rain Man”) allow Roberts to tinker with her audience’s expectations, complicating their assumed empathy for the actor with her character’s questionable (and even cruel) motives and actions. And Cameron Diaz is brilliantly used as the target of her ire — a character so warm and sunny, we can’t help but wonder whose side we’re really on.Stream it hereFrom left, Emma Stone, Woody Harrelson, Jesse Eisenberg and Abigail Breslin in “Zombieland.”Glen Wilson/Columbia Pictures‘Zombieland’ (July 31)In the aftermath of a raging zombie apocalypse, it’s kill or be killed. And the primary pleasure of this double-barreled action comedy is the extent to which the screenwriters Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick have worked through the logistics of this hellscape, as articulated by the hero (Jesse Eisenberg) and his rules for survival. An introverted college student, he joins forces with Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a gunslinging cowboy type, and the sisters Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin) on a journey through the chaos. The director Ruben Fleischer keeps the laughs and gore coming at a steady clip, so thoroughly adopting the hip approach of “Ghostbusters” that Bill Murray even shows up to play along.Stream it here More

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      'Schmigadoon!' Is an Ode to Broadway Musicals, and Pokes Fun At Them Too

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      One would think that everyone involved in the parody series “Schmigadoon!” was in love with the sometimes hokey, sometimes magical musical genre. Not quite.The director Barry Sonnenfeld has never been a theater guy.“I am not a fan of Broadway musicals,” he grumped affably over the phone. “I’m not a fan of filmed musicals. I don’t understand why people would stop talking and start singing.”So Sonnenfeld, who is best known for the “Men in Black” movies, was a curious choice to direct the new Apple TV+ comedy “Schmigadoon!,” a series whose very title screams musical theater spoof.The showrunner, Cinco Paul, a fan of Sonnenfeld’s work on the highly stylized and intermittently musical cult series “Pushing Daisies,” was unaware of the director’s aversion until they were shooting last fall, mid-pandemic, in Vancouver, British Columbia, with a blockbuster cast filled with Broadway stars.“Here we are on the set,” Paul recalled, “and he’s half jokingly saying, ‘Why are there so many songs?’”If you count reprises, they number nearly two dozen — composed by Paul, who created the show with Ken Daurio — spread over six half-hour episodes that air starting July 16.An affectionate, knowing sendup of classic American musicals, “Schmigadoon!” stars Cecily Strong of “Saturday Night Live” and Keegan-Michael Key, lately of Netflix’s “The Prom,” as a contemporary couple in a stagnating relationship. On a backpacking trip, they stumble into a frozen-in-time, trapped-in-a-musical town called Schmigadoon, which they can’t escape until they find true love.Paul, who grew up on his mother’s Broadway cast recordings and played piano for musicals as an undergraduate at Yale, said he came up with the kernel of “Schmigadoon!” almost 25 years ago. Not knowing what to do with the idea, he put it away until Andrew Singer at Lorne Michaels’s production company, Broadway Video, mentioned their interest in musicals a few years ago. A match was made.According to Strong, Michaels is — like her — “a musical dork.” And the show brought on stage-savvy writers, including Julie Klausner (“Difficult People”) and Strong’s fellow “S.N.L.” star Bowen Yang.In Schmigadoon, the locals include the sweet, melancholy Mayor Aloysius Menlove, played by the Tony Award winner Alan Cumming; the moral scourge, Mildred Layton, played by the Tony winner Kristin Chenoweth; and the handsome carny Danny Bailey, played by Aaron Tveit, who got news of his Tony nomination for “Moulin Rouge!” during the series shoot. Other boldface names from Broadway include Jane Krakowski, Ann Harada and Ariana DeBose.Recently, Paul, Sonnenfeld and members of the cast spoke separately by phone about “Schmigadoon!” and their affinity, or lack thereof, for musicals. These are edited excerpts from those interviews.“Musicals are charming, and they’re so entertaining, but they’re also sometimes dumb, and sometimes they’re problematic,” said the series co-creator Cinco Paul.Adam Amengual for The New York TimesCINCO PAUL I wanted real musical theater people. I wanted people who did eight shows a week and had those chops, because I wanted everybody to do their own singing, and I wanted to capture that singing live on set to the extent it was possible. The amount of talent we were able to get was phenomenal and was unfortunately because they weren’t able to work anywhere — because theaters were shut down. In many cases, the parts were written for these actors.BARRY SONNENFELD When I interviewed for the job, I said: “Look, here’s the thing. I want to shoot this entirely onstage and I want to shoot it in Vancouver because Vancouver has really great stages and really good crews, and it’s also cheaper.” What was surreal and wonderful was that Vancouver was the only film center that was open when we shot. L.A. was shut down. New York was shut down.CECILY STRONG We had to go shoot our “S.N.L.” intros right before I left for Vancouver. It’s like, you’re around New York and you’re seeing all these theaters shuttered. It’s a little devastating. More