25 Most Hotly Anticipated New TV Shows Of 2020
9. Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist
NBC don't tend to do multi-hyphenate shows, or high-concept stuff: so this musical-fantasy-comedy-drama about a woman who gains the ability to read minds after an MRI scan goes wrong - seeing the thoughts of others in the form of pop songs - is a significant deviation from the network’s comfort zone.
Creator, writer and showrunner Austin Winsberg is a largely unproven quantity, but the cast is uniformly excellent, and the oddball premise is sufficiently interesting on its own to engage people. Of course, the music needs to be as good as the dialogue to make a show like this work, and we won't know if they've pulled that off until we've given it a few weeks.
Weirdly enough, that same oddball premise is very similar to what actually happened to cast member and Hollywood veteran Mary Steenbergen. A dozen years ago, she had minor surgery on her arm and woke from the anaesthetic to find her own thoughts manifesting to her as music.
She'd never written a song before in her life, but ever since she's established a second career as a multi-instrumentalist musician, singer and songwriter - and one of her songs, Glasgow (No Place Like Home) was used prominently in the musical drama Wild Rose this year, and is hotly tipped to win the Oscar for best original song next February.