With an impressive creative background that includes the director of “Hamilton,” the creator of “Tick, Tick… Boom!” and the songwriters of “Frozen,” “Up Here” is a musical series that is similar to “Inside Out for young adults. The show, however, falls short of its high expectations, and the music fails to conceal the plot’s flimsiness. The result is an episodic rom-com that is essentially boring with an above-average beat.
The husband-and-wife team of Robert Lopez, a member of the elite EGOT club, and Kristen Anderson-Lopez (known for “The Book of Mormon”) adapted the musical. They worked with director Thomas Kail and writer Stephen Levenson. The show centers on Lindsay (Mae Whitman), an aspiring writer who throws everything away, including her mocking boyfriend, to see if she can succeed as a writer in New York.
The awful news hits hard and fast, but there’s a glimmer of hope when she meets Miguel Carlos Valdes, an investment banker and the man behind “The Flash,” who’s been broken up with someone else and is now healing.
The trick is that both main protagonists engage with three people from their pasts—her parents and a school chum, his mother and his girlfriend’s lover—allowing the viewer to see into their most private thoughts. For instance, Lindsay is told by the little voice, portrayed by Katie Finneran, that she should “keep those things up here in your head where nobody else can see them,” in reference to dirty ideas.
The program, which is set in 1999 at the start of the new century, definitely has a write-what-you-know vibe to it since Lindsay and Miguel, two incredibly vulnerable people, need to go through their individual baggage in order for their relationship to have any chance of succeeding. A lot of material is told through song, and those performances are cleverly enhanced by the addition of supporting actors with a background in musical theater, such as Brian Stokes Mitchell.
Whether it’s the upcoming “Grease” prequel or Apple TV+’s “Schmigadoon!” (which will have an encore in April), it’s good to see musical shows becoming more regular TV staples, especially after decades after “Cop Rock” became (unfairly) synonymous with tragedy.
However, in musicals, the songs eventually serve to forward the plot. In the case of “Up Here,” this means repeatedly slamming wrench after wrench into Lindsay and Miguel’s relationship, which becomes a little boring fast.
Thus, “Up Here” feels like an incomplete experiment that features upbeat songs but pushes the content to the limit after eight episodes.
Perhaps it is best to chalk it up to another instance when, in the end, everyone’s proposal sounded better in their heads than it did when it was really carried out.
