High School Musical: The Musical: The Series

“HSM:TM:TS” plays with the genre with an insider’s rude glee.

High School Musical: The Musical: The Series is just damn fun to watch. It knows its earnestness can be very silly, and leans hard into taking loving shots at that earnestness.

All the best moments are in that [trailer] preview and everything else is OK but very much a tween show with higher, streaming service-level production values.

While the parallels between this high school musical and the other one aren’t hard to spot, it does have a more adult vibe and a snarkiness factor that should pull in a non-Disney crowd.

What Federle and HSM: TM: TS deliver outweighs the show’s potential hang-ups: a fresh take on an old favorite that genuinely wants to give its young audience the smart, fun content it deserves.

One-part bloated gobbledygook, two-parts meta satire, this funny/kitschy Disney+ mockumentary series resides somewhere between spin-off, reboot and self-parody. Either way, it's another classic ouroboros from the House of Mouse, which plumes itself with audience nostalgia. Thankfully, it's bright enough...as long as you can stomach High School Musical hagiography.

The result is surprisingly refreshing, even with a title that suggests a sense of redundancy. ... The series is not a reinvention of its genre, but it shines in its little specifics, like the agony of listening to someone slog through reading stage directions out loud, or impromptu harmonies that are really just singing an octave up. The cast is bubbly and terrific, and the zingers (“my mother bounced back from an autopsy!”) keep everything from becoming schlockola.

The result is equal parts clever and sweet, with an energetic cast and a love triangle plot that’s sure to make junior romantics starry-eyed. The Series is still a bit too Disney-sanitized to have much intrinsic appeal for adults, but there are enough meta jokes to ensure that their eyes don’t glaze over.