As the inimitable Titus Andromedon taught us on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, teeth are your outside bones. Now, thanks to Girls5eva, they’re also nightmare fuel.
For three seasons, Meredith Scardino’s series has been delightful, witty, and nostalgic without being too self-indulgent, and it’s also now responsible for the most horrifying image I’ve seen on television this year: more spooky than a corpsicle or a cosmonaut’s decaying body floating through space; more grotesque than horse guts spilling all over the battlefield or Chancellor Vernham’s father’s corpse steadily rotting in a glass coffin; more unsettling than Tom Sandoval attempting to mimic human feelings or DJ James Kennedy puzzling out how to provide refreshments for a pool party.
Prepare yourself. What you are about to see you will never unsee. What Girls5eva did to its attractive Harry Styles stand-in Gray Holland (Thomas Doherty) is hilarious, awful, and unforgettable. Behold: What if a human had all their teeth pulled and replaced with a fox’s?
Terrible with his eyes closed. Terrible with his eyes open.
Terrible in profile. Terrible head-on.
Terrible in close-up. Terrible in wide.
Some context: Holland is a megastar in the third season of Girls5eva, a self-described “sensitive boy” who disguises himself as a trucker to escape his fame and eat pasta undisturbed at Macaroni Rascals. He crosses paths with Paula Pell’s Gloria, who is so out of touch that she doesn’t recognize the man whose tour revenue was larger than Germany’s entire economy off the strength of lyrics like “This English lonely boy / His one true friend’s a sweater.” When the rest of Girls5eva find out whom Gloria has been hanging out with, they invite him to play a stripped-down set with them — and then try to further leverage his fame for their own benefit. Disappointed by everyone wanting a piece of his popularity, Holland takes the drastic step of faking his own death with the help of dentist Gloria, who replaces all his teeth with those of Mandy, the injured fox she had been rehabilitating in Girls5eva’s tour van, and uses her expertise from murder podcasts to scatter his actual teeth where people think Holland’s plane crashed. When we see Holland again, it’s with a mouth now full of tiny, needle-sharp, tapered protrusions.
It’s nice that Holland ends up happy, but at what cost? This disgusted woman next to the stage who takes one look at Holland — excuse me, Mad Dog Williams — as he croons in this hole-in-the-wall open mic in Yellowknife, Canada, and then hastily looks back down at her laptop in total disgust: She’s all of us.
There are so many things wrong with this body horror; where to even start? The proportions: The teeth are too small for his gums, so there are huge gaps. The shape: They’re so clearly animalistic — almost conical instead of flat-fronted — that they make Holland’s whole face look uncanny. (Whom does Holland go to for dental care now? Maybe Gloria provides house calls.) The visual: Do people really need to open their mouths while they sing? What if they just … didn’t, and we could simply luxuriate in Holland’s beard and butch flannel?
I am trying not to be the jerk who says Holland should have stayed hot and unhappy, because on a very basic level, Gloria is a good friend for doing to him what no one else would. Plus, the gag does allow for an amusing callback during Girls5eva’s Radio City Music Hall concert, which includes both Holland and Mandy (her teeth fully on display) in the “in memoriam” segment.
But I can appreciate that one of Girls5eva’s guiding narrative themes is interrogating how much of ourselves we give up to be famous, and whether mainstream success is worth the loss of authenticity, while also thinking that Girls5eva made that lesson too literal by sacrificing Holland’s teeth on the altar of personal fulfillment through anonymity. Being able to possess two seemingly opposing ideas at the same time, that’s media literacy!
More From This Series
- The Best TV Shows of 2024 (So Far)
- No One’s Watching the Best Comedy on Netflix
- Girls5Eva Let Catherine Cohen Revert to Her Tween-age Self
