Four seasons in, trying to describe the state of affairs on High School Musical: the Musical: the Series makes you sound like you’re caught up in a YouTube-based conspiracy theory. The show’s original premise, back in 2019, was that a new drama teacher (Kate Reinders) at the Salt Lake City high school where they filmed the High School Musical movies decided to get her students to perform the stage-musical adaptation of the film. That meant that a bunch of teens who didn’t fit the Disney Channel archetypes established by the likes of Zac Efron and Vanessa Hudgens would bump up against the experience of having to play those archetypes. Joshua Bassett is Ricky, who’s more of a slacker than Troy’s jock; Olivia Rodrigo was Nini, a shier, perpetually overlooked not-quite Gabriella. (You may have heard about how she’s now incredibly famous.) By season two, Nini has gone viral in-universe, and the focus shifts more to the supporting players. In season three, Nini has left school altogether for a career in L.A. (a cheekily self-aware development), and in the summer, the rest of the kids go off to theater camp, where they appear in an in-universe documentary (hosted by Corbin Bleu as himself) about the first high-school production of Frozen. As if to top all that meta-ness, season four finds the students back at school, surrounded by a Disney+ film crew shooting High School Musical 4 on location. Meanwhile, their drama teacher wants to do a stage version of High School Musical 3 before her students graduate, if she can only keep them from getting cast in the movie.
I’m out of breath just typing that description, but to its credit, the series makes this Jenga tower of a conceit feel structurally sound by keeping its attention on the emotional reality of the kids inside it. I’m biased, considering I was a theater kid, but the characters on HSM:TM:TS seem more real to me than in any of its sibling teen dramas currently airing. By the final season, Ricky is in a relationship with Sofia Wylie’s character, Gina, who came into the show as a confrontational overachiever but shifts to a more vulnerable place as she meshes with the theater-kid clique. It’s tricky to make a second romance believable in the wake of another character leaving the show, but Bassett and Wylie have an easy chemistry and the show does a good job of acknowledging how so many normal high-school pressures, like anxiety about college, can pull people apart or push them together.
Sometimes, the meta high jinks put a strain on the emotional reality of the show. After the events of the last season, all the main characters are vaguely famous because of that documentary about their time at camp (Bleu’s wildly exaggerated take on “Corbin Bleu†involves a lot of talking about flying private jets), and Gina gets recruited to act in High School Musical 4 opposite its flirty fake Disney Channel–heartthrob lead. But the show grounds those leaps in understandable emotional dynamics: The introduction of the Disney star provides a guy who would be perfect for Gina on paper, so how does that affect her relationship with the much less put-together Ricky? It’s the classic case of the intrusion of a new hot transfer student, just rendered by way of jokes about Dog With a Blog.
It also helps that the series has developed its supporting cast into characters who are just as (and, often, more) compelling as its leads. After a summer of reckoning with queer feelings at camp, Julia Lester’s Ashlyn is figuring out her dynamic with her boyfriend, Larry Saperstein’s Big Red, who is also bi, which leads to some very funny yet sweet conversations between the two. Their eventual coming to terms with each other is hilariously anticlimactic (they even go shopping together after) in a way that captures how compulsory hetero high-school dating can transition into queer friendship. Similarly, there’s tension involving cheating between the show’s primary gay couple, Joe Serafini’s Seb and Frankie A. Rodriguez’s Carlos, that ends up delightfully convoluted and a bit catty — which, in my experience, is very true to the dynamics of high-school drama, onstage or otherwise. As the older characters face down high-school graduation, HSM:TM:TS takes a relatively realistic-for-TV look at their anxieties about their futures, especially in the case of Dara Reneé’s Kourtney, who is figuring out whether she wants to try to get into an Ivy or follow her heart to another place that might be a better fit. It’s all the stuff of what is typical high-school angst, rendered carefully and then wrapped in the glitteriest of packaging.
The show tends to be loud about all its winking HSM commentary (look at the guest stars!) but quiet about how much it sneaks past Disney under the cover of the franchise. More and more of the characters are explicitly queer, and there’s a passing line about making sure to use protection. The show has to navigate the limits of respectability as imposed by Disney+, but compared to similar high-school-set dramas, such as Love, Victor or Heartstopper, that can feel straitjacketed by their need to please, HSM:TM:TS feels queer in tone as well as subject. It looks at things askew and isn’t afraid to not translate its in-jokes, whether they’re about dating or the original High School Musical or niche Broadway references, and I remain impressed by the sleight of hand it managed to get away with, gesturing toward the big and conceptual while slipping in something cozy and real. Watching High School Musical: The Musical: The Series feels like hanging out with everyone at Denny’s after the performance of the big school musical. Too bad the parents are on their way to make everyone pack it up and head home.