Galavant Series Premiere Review: “Pilot/Joust Friends” (Season 1, Episode 1&2)

The show sits as a mid-season replacement for ABC’s fairy-tale crown jewel, Once Upon A Time. Perhaps those not well-versed in OUAT’s dizzyingly dense mythology will think the two the same, but the shows easily occupy their own space on the light-hearted fairy-tale spectrum. Galavant, at least, has a winning mark in the sets department over ABC’s Disney gumbo of a series. If CGI was used anywhere in this first hour, it fooled me. It’s shot well and crafted even better, with great pacing through each episode and nearly every commercial break ending with a satisfying chortle of a joke.

But perhaps the show’s best, most surprising aspect is its willingness to be an NBC sitcom during previously designated “family hours” of ABC primetime. The more adult humor I referenced earlier wasn’t just to Lady Magdalena having sex with the court jester or a song about the King wanting to separate Galavant’s head from his neck and dance in his raining blood, but to the show’s embrace of anachronistic, meta humor above its already weird premise.

Characters drop f-bombs and are bleeped Parks & Rec-style in the process, everyone around them taking it in stride. Perhaps its best incarnation is after the second episode’s cold opening, when Galavant slumps over and wheezes, “Holy F@#!, I’m out of shape.” From that opening, to a mid-episode training montage about how needlessly pointless training montages are, to a winningly inept jousting finale, the meta-humor is subtle and rare enough to provide a dose of we’re-in-on-this hilarity when it shows up, but never becomes overbearing.

The songs should be mentioned, as well, since they’re surprisingly catchy. Nothing you’ll be memorizing lyrics for anytime soon, but a few stray ballads may become lodged into your head if you let them. The lyrics skew immature if paying attention – “Now, at last begins our true adventure/Epic, wild, a real butt-clincher!” – but their nimble, hyper-kinetic delivery never bores, undoubtedly due to Menken’s work on the songs. Maybe their biggest downfall is that they all begin to sound like one another after the first three or four, most delivered by a single narrator allowing scene changes and capping episodes, with the best, most enjoyable stand-outs being the character-based numbers. But, really, that they’re good at all is cause for celebration.

And that could be said for the show as a whole: a half-hour musical comedy set in a fantasy thirteenth century with an anachronistic angle and an advertising campaign featuring Meghan Trainor’s “All About That Bass.” This could have been a train wreck, and it’s not. Admittedly, things take a bit of a dive if the show’s thought about too long. The entire first hour’s dramatic heft – and assumedly, the upcoming season as a whole – revolves around the saving of a woman who doesn’t want to be saved. The subsequent attempt to squeeze some soap-opera-style drama out of the show, with a few subplots hinting at dissension within Galavant’s squad and marital strife between Omundson’s evil king and Mallory Jansen’s enjoyably blunt Madalena, are sort of squandered when bookended by songs referencing genital mutilation.

Which, of course, could be the series’ downfall: all flash and no substance. With so many balls in the air, between songs and jokes and the premise’s backed-in wackiness, Galavant may benefit from its shortened promise of a four-hour event series over a proper months-long season, a satisfying piece of evidence in itself for its creators’ preternatural understanding of the core ideals of the show. It’s just the future of the series beyond that point that remains foggy. But, for now at least, in this crowd-pleasing first hour, Galavant rides high.