by Mike Hilty, Contributing Writer
I love great musicals. When it comes to TV, it’s hard to maintain a musical since the production values of a musical number are hard to keep up with. Shows like Glee, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist all managed to put the musical back on the map for television. Each show eventually lost its magic because it sometimes felt like a novelty. The musical TV series feels destined to go the route of the limited series, with enough time to tell a story, while preserving the power the genre can have.
Up Here is Hulu’s new entry into the genre.
Before even getting into everything else, I couldn’t believe how much talent was assembled behind the scenes for this show. Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez wrote the music for Up Here, which boosts the musical credibility since their credits include Frozen and Frozen 2. Steven Levenson, who wrote tick, tick…BOOM!,signed on to write the screenplay and serve as a creator and executive producer. Thomas Kail, who directed the stage performance of Hamilton that is currently streaming on Disney+, directed two episodes. All of this to say, there is a massive amount of musical street cred here.
But I don’t understand what happened, because this could have been so much better.
Up Here follows Lindsay (Mae Whitman), an aspiring writer who moves from her sleepy Vermont town to New York to experience life. I’ve been a huge fan of Whitman since Jason Bateman was calling her egg on Arrested Development, but this is the first thing I’ve seen where she sings — she does a great job! Whitman brings equal parts heart and neurotic energy to Lindsay. I didn’t love a lot of her choices throughout the show, but I can’t knock it too much because it’s part of the story for Lindsay to make mistakes and be unsure about herself.
While in New York, she meets Miguel (Carlos Valdes), who is in the finance industry on the cusp of Y2K. I like Miguel as a character, and I think Valdes’ voice is strong and blends well with Whitman’s. Miguel has to figure out what he wants to do with his life — he struggles with following his dreams and providing for himself and his family. He cares about his family, and Whitman and Valdes have allure together. His inner voices serve as a great balance among some diverse voices and styles. Miguel has more emotional moments when it comes to his story.
The music has a manic energy about, and the songs all slap. There are strong musical numbers, and the set design is great. The choreography (when it’s there) is strong, but there could have been more. For a musical, the pieces are all there to make something truly special.
But the problem with Up Here is with the story.
This is a pretty generic love story that tries its hand at saying something impactful. But it’s a mess with sitcom-level miscommunication that gets frustrating at times. Whitman and Valdes are both wasted as leads; they give good performances, but can’t do much with a poor story. We see their relationship yo-yo between being good and bad for the majority of the series, and I didn’t care what was going on with them by the final episode.
One of the central messages of Up Here is that sometimes you need to get out of your own way and your own head. Both Lindsay and Miguel have inner voices that talk and sing to them while criticizing everything they do. It’s a telling message about how you need to trust yourself, and maybe you are the one holding yourself back, and not all the extraneous factors. This message has its ups and downs, and I wish we would have explored more of the relationship with the voices of each character.
The final episode reveals aspects of Lindsay’s book, and I wish there would have been more of a focus on that instead of their relationship. I also wish they would have ended it a different way, because I did not like the final moment of the show, despite the song being a showstopper. And the could have leaned more into the Y2K aspect of the final episode. There’s no other reason for this show to take place during the late 1990s; if they had added more aspects of Y2K panic, it would have resonated more with me.
Up Here has a lot of great things going for it. I enjoyed the lead character’s performances and the songs are wonderfully catchy. But the weak story drags this down so much that it doesn’t ever recover. I like the show enough, even if I really wanted to love it. If you like musicals, check this one out, but temper your expectations, considering the level of talent involved in making this. This would have made a great broadway musical with more depth if the main message around relationships would have been more earned.
Score: 6/10
Up Here is currently streaming on Hulu
You can read more from Mike Hilty, and follow him on Twitter, Letterboxd, and Serializd