An ode to the partial musical

I feel like it's been a while but remember when every tv show had to have a musical episode? Was Riverdale the last one? Who knows, who knows, but for a quite a lot of years they were apparently essential, despite the fact that the only one that was any good, or did anything interesting with the concept happened all the way back in 2001, on Buffy the Vampire.

The thing about the Buffy musical epsiode, Once More, with Feeling, that sets it above other musical episodes of tv shows is that it uses the conventions of musical theatre to advance the plot of the series.

Sometimes, in a musical, the songs take the place of dialogue. The characters sing to each other when, in the fiction they inhabit, they are having a conversation. But sometimes the songs are non-diegetic. Characters sing what they're thinking and the audience hears them, but the other characters don't.

In Once More, with Feeling a demon is in Sunnydale causing everyone in town to perform their lives as if they're in a musical. This includes making them sing non-diegetic songs – but they're actually doing it, out loud, within the fiction, in front of each other. All the characters sing their deepest feelings, their carefully kept secrets and everyone hears them, and those revelations drive the show forward over the subsequent episodes.

No one else has bothered to do anything quite that interesting with the form so honestly I don't know why anyone else has bothered to have musical episodes, but I suppose that doesn't really matter because I'm not here to talk about musical episodes. I'm here to talk about something much better: when a tv show or a movie turns into a musical very briefly and then stops being one.

I love this.