With Sweeney Todd's taking home a Golden Globe and the commercial success of Hairspray, Dreamgirls and High School Musical we're certainly past the days when the movie musical is considered box office poison.

But as much as I enjoy popping Chicago in the DVD player, I really like it when episodic television takes a musical turn, and lately we've seen some great additions to the genre (along with a few disasters ... yes, we mean you, Viva Laughlin). A good musical number can make an episode especially memorable, as in the following examples ...

30 Rock: "Midnight Train to Georgia"

Last week's 30 Rock (the season finale, unless the writers' strike is resolved soon), ended with a performance of Gladys Knight and the Pips' "Midnight Train to Georgia" inspired by Kenneth Parcell's (Jack McBrayer) deciding to leave New York to return his home in Georgia. The Motown classic is used to express the friendship between Kenneth and Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), Jenna (Jane Krakowski)'s need to be in the spotlight and the divide splitting Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) and his liberal congresswoman girlfriend C.C. (Edie Falco) apart. The highlight of the number arrives when Tina Fey changes the meaning of "I've got to go" into a cry of "TMI!" Coming from the 30 Rock characters, the meaning of "Midnight Train to Georgia" changes hilariously.
(Thanks to scribegrrrl for finding the video.)

Pushing Daisies: "Hopelessly Devoted to You"

Pushing Daisies' Kristin Chenoweth is well known as a Broadway performer and when her character, Olive Snook, broke into a performance of "Hopelessly Devoted to You" it was an apt marriage of Daisies' fanciful tone and Chenoweth's talents. The original version, from Grease, comes when Sandy realizes how strong her feelings are for Danny, no matter how angry he may make her. On Daisies, however, Olive is fighting her love for Ned, a feeling she hasn't felt free to express honestly.

More recently, Daisies gave us Ellen Greene (who played Audrey in Little Shop of Horrors) singing "Morning Has Broken" as her character breaks out of depression. As with 30 Rock, these moments offer more than a catchy tune: they're a way of expressing where these characters are emotionally in a way that dialogue can't.

X-Play: The Musical

A program consisting of video game reviews shouldn't have much of a shelf life. I mean, who needs to know if The Movies is any good at this point? However, X-Play's snarky, irreverent tone and pop culture references make reruns watchable months and even years afterwards. One of X-Play's more unusual episodes treated viewers to a musical where the devil corrupts hosts Adam Sessler and Morgan Webb with the promise of an X-Play video game (you can watch it here). Spoofing everything from current games to X-Play's own game rating system ("One out of five, it's the only game I know that lowers your sex drive."), the musical has all the smarts and sass you'd expect to hear in an X-Play review.

In an interview in the current issue of Instinct Magazine film composer Marc Shaiman (best known for his musical scores to quirky films like The Addams Family, Down With Love, and the brilliant music and lyrics for South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut) and his partner, lyricist Scott Wittman announce that they've been signed to write the long-rumored musical episode of ABC's Ugly Betty for the end of this season. The pair previously won the Tony Award for Best Score for writing the music and lyrics for the musical Hairspray.

This announcement further solidifies Betty's title as "The Gayest Show On TV". As Shaiman himself says in the interview:

"It's great we're talking to a gay magazine, because where else can you say 'How much gayer can it get on TV?' Only with c*cksucking on TV could it get any gayer."

While this announcement is great news for fans of both Ugly Betty and musical theater alike, everything is dependent on whether the writers strike is resolved before the end of the current television season. Sadly, with tempers only rising on each side, a fast end to the strike seems to be increasingly less likely.