Schmigadoon! Brings Its Inside Jokes to Its Ancestral Home

Schmigadoon! replicates much of the golden-age façade while seeming afraid of those shows’ political shadows. The show gestures at the classic targets of old-timey sexism, small-mindedness, and nativism—much of it embodied by Gasteyer’s scheming character—but only in the safest possible ways. Its aims instead are centered squarely on the importance of Josh and Melissa’s romance, the value in getting one partner to open up for another. I left the theater amused, but with a nagging feeling I’ve kept experiencing recently—that of loving an incredible shrinking genre.