The New ‘High School Musical’ TV Series Might Just Break Reality As We Know It
I hope you like 'High School Musical', because 'High School Musical The TV Series' is a high school musical about 'High School Musical'.
Things are getting extremely meta in the new Disney production of High School Musical the TV show, where the fourth wall will not only be broken, but dismantled piece by piece.
So, the newly announced TV show version of the famous musical franchise is the story of a group of kids doing High School Musical as their high school musical. Read that again and let the insanity truly sink in.
It’s formally called High School Musical: the Musical, and it’s a “10 episode story shot as a docu-style series” about “a group of students at East High who stage a performance of High School Musical.”
What? What? What? East High is the high school where the original titular High School Musical was set. Are these new kids performing a musical in their high school about a musical written ABOUT their high school? Did Troy Bolton ever exist in this universe? Does Zac Efron exist? Do they both somehow exist?
A musical by its very nature breaks the fourth wall in some way — we’re meant to suspend reality a little bit every time everybody breaks into song together and then doesn’t acknowledge how weird that is.
Will all the songs in the TV show be only performed as parts of the “fictional” musical they are producing? And therefore are we meant to assume that the original film trilogy is in fact… fiction all along.
What if they were written by famously sad loner Troy Bolton, who dreamed of being a star basketball player and singer… but never did either, instead leaving behind to his school a testament to his frustrated dreams in the form of a musical?
Reboots and revivals are taking on a dangerous and edgy new precedent if they start mythologising the original text. It’s the start of something new. We’re breaking free of regular programming.
How will reality cope with this new trend? How will we cope? We’re all in this together now.
my favorite part of high school musical was when troy died and gabriella dated sharpay instead
— conan gray (@conangray) August 30, 2018