Apple TV+ Unveils Trailer for the Next Show That’s Going to Steal Your Heart
With Ted Lasso, Central Park, Little America and its new offering Schmigadoon!, Apple TV+ seems to have settled into a wholesome, feel-good TV groove.
On Friday, Apple premiered the trailer for Schmigadoon!, its highly anticipated new musical series debuting Friday, July 16th. The show stars Cecily Strong and Keegan-Michael Key as Melissa and Josh, a backpacking couple on relationship retreat who wander off and get trapped in the the odd town where everyone breaks into song and dance as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
Josh (Key) and Melissa (Strong) are having a rough patch in their relationship, which becomes a problem once they realize they are trapped in Schmigadoon. Josh and Melissa find out they can’t leave until they find true love, but they don’t know if that is with each other or someone new. They get close to the other residents, played by Broadway veterans like Alan Cumming, Jane Krakowski, Kristin Chenoweth, and Ariana DeBose. The cast also includes Fred Armisen, Dove Cameron, Aaron Tveit, Jaime Camil and Ann Harada. Will the unhappy couple figure out what they want out of life and love in just six episodes?
Cumming plays the town’s mayor, Mayor Menlove (get it?), while Harada stars as his clueless wife Florence. Armisen plays a religious leader, with Chenoweth as his nosy wife. Tveit is the town’s bad boy, intent on winning Melissa, while Cameron plays a farmer’s daughter who sets her cap at Josh. Camil stars as the town’s cold-hearted doctor and Krakowski as his wife. Martin Short rounds out the cast as, you guessed it, a leprechaun.
The trailer, featuring earnest, full-cast song and dance numbers, vibrant, candy-colored sets and costumes, and the confused yet game Strong and Key who decide to not fight the weirdness and just play their musical parts, looks absolutely delightful.
The title and plot is an obvious riff on Brigadoon, the 1954 Gene Kelly-Cyd Charisse movie musical about a mystical Scottish village that exists only one day every hundred years. (The movie is based on the 1947 Broadway musical from Lerner and Loewe.) The trailer also highlights musical numbers reminiscent of songs from Oklahoma! and The Music Man.
Despicable Me screenwriters Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio co-created Schmigadoon! Paul will serve as showrunner and wrote all of the original music for the series. Barry Sonnenfeld (Men in Black) directs in addition to executive-producing the show along with Andrew Singer and Saturday Night Live‘s Lorne Michaels.
“There’s a whole tone to the show, which is both real, but very theatrical,” Sonnenfeld said during a Television Critics of America panel last winter. “So the acting has to be both theatrical and real. And we were very lucky that everyone was able to pull that off as well.”
The first two episodes of the six-episode season premieres on Apple TV+ on July 16th. After that, Apple will release one new episode every Friday.