Two of this season’s new TV shows are standing out — for their music. Take a look.
■ So far the CW’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” has escaped the cheesy smell that clings to many musical series — remember “Cop Rock” and “Smash”?
The riotous songs are hatched by the series’ creator and star, Rachel Bloom, and Adam Schlesinger, from the band Fountains of Wayne and the Broadway show “Cry-Baby.”
“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” was originally slated for Showtime. “It was going to be raunchier,” Schlesinger says. “We’re still doing explicit and clean versions of some of the songs.”
Schlesinger’s Broadway experience helps: “The show is a musical that just happens to be on television.”
That doesn’t mean he’s overly reverent, though: “Musicals can be pretty corny,” he says, “so you can have fun with the form. And Rachel’s laugh-out-loud funny — that helps.”
■ Aziz Ansari writes and stars in the Netflix series “Master of None.” And judging by its soundtrack, he’s a master of music, as well.
The music was a key element of setting the show apart, musical director Zach Cowie says.
“Something that ties a lot of this sound together is the ‘record collector’ headspace that both Aziz and I pull from,” Cowie says.
That’s what led to a playlist (which you can stream on Spotify) that ranges from a dreamy French love song by Serge Gainsbourg to hip-hop from Young Buck to high-energy female-led punk from X-Ray Spex. Choosing deep cuts was intentional.
Cowie says Ansari and co-creator Alan Yang “created a little world in this 10 episode arc, and it made sense to me that we shouldn’t share the emotional baggage carried by well-known music, which might bring to mind other existing worlds and steal people from ours.”