Zoey's Extraodinary Playlist?

Can I be totally transparent? Yes? Okay, I haven't really been that interested in anything I have absorbed on television or the internet in years. To be quite frank, art however, subjective it always turns out to be has really been lacking for me, personally, as a viewer of the craft. Ever since the pandemic, it feels like, nothing seems to be interesting or entertaining. Everything seems almost dull or is trying a bit too hard to be something it's clearly missing the mark in.

That being said, I was on Peacock just this past weekend, having finished the last season of Smash ( I know...) and another show was recommended to me, so I thought I'd give it a shot. The show was cute, and quirky, and overall fun, I almost forgot how much pain and agony having a psychotic episode was. The show I'm talking about is of course, is Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist.

I'll admit, I didn't start enjoying it until halfway through the first episode. But once it clicked, it really clicked. I was watching a woman I don't have any real emotional connect with yet, have a mental breakdown/medical emergency. And we as the viewer are meant to feel for it differently, I guess?

What Hooked Me (And What I Recognized)

The music is modern, the story is different, and I think taking the concept of a musical and breaking down the protagonist's role was what initially hooked me. In traditional musicals, the main character bursts into song. But Zoey doesn't - not at first. For the first six episodes, everyone around her sings and halfway through the first episode she recognizes that what she's experiencing and seeing is in her head. She becomes a witness to what she perceives as their inner lives, hearing thoughts and feelings expressed through contemporary songs.

But here's what I recognized from my own experience with psychosis: we're watching life through Zoey's inner child's eyes, looking at it through Disney goggles. What the show presents as a magical ability is actually a delusion. The whimsy, the music, the vibrant choreographed numbers - these are how her mind is processing a frightening loss of grip on reality, transforming it into something beautiful and manageable.

And for six episodes, the show asks us to buy into this delusion with her. We're meant to see it as a gift, as something extraordinary. But what it actually represents is a mind that can no longer distinguish between internal experience and external reality, that has retreated into a childlike fantasy framework to cope.

Episode Seven: The Breaking Point

Then episode seven happens. Zoey gets devastating news about her father, and for the first time, she has musical outbursts of her own. Her weakness in thought - her cognitive grip on reality - has deteriorated to the point where she's no longer just perceiving others through this distorted lens. She's fully inside it now. She's singing.

This was a breaking point for me as a viewer. When she starts singing to her dad, I started to cry. I was moved, feeling the emotional pull of the song and her relationship with her father. But I was also profoundly disturbed. Because the show is still treating this as whimsical, as touching, as a breakthrough moment - when what I'm watching is someone's mental state clearly getting worse. The delusion is intensifying, consuming her more completely, and it's being packaged as character development.

Finding Forgiveness Through Understanding

But here's what's strange and maybe valuable: breaking down the show like this, examining what I'm actually seeing versus what the show wants me to see, is helping me forgive something. Not the show, exactly. And not myself, though that's part of it.

I'm forgiving the delusion itself.

I'm forgiving that impulse to see the world through an inner child's Disney goggles when reality becomes too harsh, too painful, too overwhelming to process any other way. Zoey's mind has created a framework where people express their deepest truths through music, where emotions are choreographed and contained within the safe structure of song. It's a coping mechanism. It's her psyche trying to survive something it can't otherwise handle.

The show may not consciously realize what it's depicting. It may genuinely believe it's created a cute, quirky musical dramedy about a woman with a special power. But what it's actually created - intentionally or not - is a portrait of psychosis from the inside, where the delusion feels magical, where it feels like understanding rather than disconnection.

And maybe that's not something to condemn. Maybe that's just honest.

Final Thoughts

These first seven episodes of Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist broke through my viewing slump, but not for the reasons the show intended. They reminded me what it feels like to recognize yourself in art, even when - especially when - that art doesn't fully understand what it's showing you.

If you've experienced psychosis, you might see what I see in Zoey. If you haven't, you might just see a fun musical show with modern music and emotional depth. Both experiences are valid. But I'd encourage you to look a little closer, to ask yourself what you're really watching when Zoey hears another song.

You might be watching someone trying to survive the only way they know how.

And in breaking down that survival mechanism, in understanding it, maybe there's a path toward forgiving it - in fictional characters and in ourselves.