"Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist" Preview Released

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Why NBC waited more than a month between airing Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist's first and second episodes

The musical comedy from Paul Feig premiered on Jan. 7 after a special episode of Ellen's Game of Games. Its second episode airs on Sunday, Feb. 16. Why the long wait? "NBC has used the long gap between installments of the Jane Levy–led series to make it ubiquitous, striking deals to place the show’s first episode on a slew of large digital platforms like YouTube, Hulu, Facebook, and Spotify, while also embedding the hour in ads the network took out on sites such as Playbill, Bustle, and yes, Vulture," explains Josef Adalian. "NBC’s hope: Younger audiences who’ve been abandoning linear TV will take notice of Zoey before it settles into its weekly broadcast run" on Sunday. “We’re approaching the launch and the marketing of the show in a way that would attract the people that might not necessarily come and see it on a linear platform,” says Liza Katz, NBC's co-head of scripted programming. Indeed, Zoey's pilot has more than 40 million views on YouTube since it was uploaded shortly after its premiere.

Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist and Spotify have the perfect marketing matchup

The partnership between the Jane Levy-led musical dramedy and Spotify enables NBC to reach younger viewers. As Jeff Beer reports, "with NBC, Spotify not only created content utilizing its vaunted discovery engine but also incorporated video streaming for the first time with an entertainment marketing partner, allowing users to watch the show on Spotify itself. Spotify users can access tracks from the first three episodes in advance of them airing. The playlist will update automatically as subsequent episodes air. Now through February 16, you can also go to a Spotify-created microsite and enter your birthday and favorite genre of music to get a custom soundtrack of your life. The show will also temporarily take over one of Spotify’s top stations during the week leading up to its premiere, similar to how Jordan Peele took over the Film & TV Favorites playlist last year to help promote Us." NBC Universal's Kjerstin Beatty adds: “That just speaks to an overall marketing trend, which is to know people aren’t going to watch a show when we tell them to watch it,” says Beatty. “For us, shows like Zoey, with a younger audience appeal, it’s important that we have a mechanism to keep them engaged—and find them in the first place. There’s just so much competition, we need to make sure whatever we do is always on, to some degree, as much as we can.”

Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist is reminiscent of Greg Berlanti's ABC musical dramedy Eli Stone

The two-season 2007-2008 ABC legal musical dramedy created by Berlanti and Marc Guggenheim starred Jonny Lee Miller as an ambitious lawyer who had musical hallucinations, specifically of George Michael performing "Faith." "Going back to the comparison between Eli Stone and Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist: While the latter notably hasn’t hitched its wagon to one musician specifically, the obvious light-hearted jukebox musical-drama setup brings forth comparisons," says LaToya Ferguson. "Especially with the case of the cast singing all of the songs themselves, which wasn’t the case for Netflix’s one-blink-and-you’ll-miss-it series, Soundtrack, where actors would lipsync the original recordings of its song choices. Unlike Glee or Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, neither of these series are musicals first, though Zoey’s is perhaps more concerned with the musical aspect than Eli Stone ultimately was. Plus, there’s the fact that Zoey’s musical condition seems to be the result of technological mumbo jumbo—a CT scan merging with a literal music playlist—which gives her the ability to read people’s minds through song. Stone’s condition manifests itself in both musical moments and fantastical imagery (like his world turning into World War II, or the beach, or a dragon following him) and is, in fact, in favor of a higher power. While both series are earnest interpretations of a specific genre, dedicated to having a little heart in a world that’s forgotten it, Eli Stone was also clearly dedicated to a much larger-than-life concept."

Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist's Alex Newell aims to be the black icon he never had

The Glee alum is making his mark on NBC musical dramedy as Mo, a sassy gender-nonconforming neighbor who becomes the first of Zoey’s friends to catch on to her newfound superpower. Newell, who is also gay and gender-nonconforming and uses the pronouns “he” and “his,” draws on a lot of real-life experience to play Mo. “You never really see a nonbinary character’s dating life ever on television, or you don’t see someone that’s effeminate or plus-size have a love interest on TV,” he tells the Huffington Post. “I was like, ‘Let’s do that.’ He took everything I said into account, and we see all of that throughout the season. Mo gets to be a ho!”

Mary Steenburgen: Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist is like The Good Place in that parents can watch with their kids

"You know, my husband's (Ted Danson) in a show, The Good Place, and one of the beautiful things about that show has been that people sit and watch that with their kids. In the case of that show, they talk about morality because that's what the show's about: good versus evil and all that stuff," Steenburgen tells The Hollywood Reporter. "It's not really preachy, but it does bring up all these issues about right and wrong. And people have these amazing conversations that we hear about. We're constantly stopped on the street by parents of, like, 12-year-old kids, and the 12-year-old is geeking out and the mother is geeking out too. And they talk about the show. One of the things about Zoey's is I feel like people who have someone that is hurting or ill in their life — the caregivers of the world, which are usually the families — are going to really watch this show together. But I also feel like kids are going to go crazy for this show because of the music and all the cute funny people and watch it with their parents, who are going to also hear music from our generation. So I feel excited about that."