This '30 Rock' for the music biz has one key twist: It might also break your heart

In "Girls5eva," the latest sitcom to emerge from the Tina Fey-Robert Carlock combine, Sara Bareilles, Busy Philipps, Paula Pell and Renée Elise Goldsberry play the members of a briefly famous '90s girl group who fate, if not the public, calls to reunite. Like other shows in the Fey-Carlock canon — "30 Rock," "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," the much-improved "Mr. Mayor," renewed for a second season on NBC — it is a hodgepodge of real feeling and cartoon rhythms, deadpan reactions to crazy stuff and meltdowns over nothing, surrealist throwaways and pop-cultural satire. At once biting and heartwarming, it may mock its characters but never their feelings, of which they have many.

The model is the Spice Girls and their casting-call ilk. ("We've been best friends ever since we auditioned for a man in a motel in New Jersey," Goldsberry's character, Wickie, declares in an old "TRL" interview.). When a sample of their hit, "Famous 5eva" — "Gonna be famous 5eva / 'Cause forever's too short" — surfaces in a young artist's new song, the surviving members of Girls5eva are drawn back into one another's orbit.

Bareilles plays Dawn, "The Chill One," settled down with a regular-guy husband (Daniel Breaker, from the Broadway stage) and a slightly irregular child, working in a restaurant for her brother (Dean Winters, Liz Lemon's lunkhead sometime love interest on "30 Rock"). Summer (Philipps) is "The Hot One," an arrangement of weaponized hair and makeup, married to Kevin (Andrew Rannells, also of Broadway, and TV and film), a former boy band member whose "swoopy boy band hair ... caused one of his eyes to atrophy and turn inward," and who she sees only once a month; the rest of the time he is in Tampa, working as an entertainment reporter and living a life of which she is critically unconscious. "I've tried out for the 'Housewives,' like, eight times," she tells Dawn, but the Housewives would eat her alive.

Gloria (Pell) has become a dentist; she and her ex-wife (Janine Brito) have the distinction of being "the first gay couple in the state of New York to get divorced," though Gloria still carries a torch. Wickie (Goldsberry), "The Fierce One," who left the group to unsuccessfully solo and whose fashion "fempire" turns out to be a social media scam, remains a star in her mind, if a wig-hair short of a diva. (We first see her walking down a hall with a scarf streaming straight behind her, as if in a strong wind.) Fifth Girl5eva Ashley, seen in old facsimiles of MTV and played by Ashley Park, is dead. Now just a plaque on a bench, she had been the de facto leader: "She got us through all our breakups with Moby." (Park and Erika Henningsen, who plays Gloria in flashbacks, are both from the original Broadway cast of Fey's "Mean Girls" musical.)

Their goal, stated early, is to perform at the Jingle Ball, the real-world Christmas pop event that fills arenas in selected cities. And this long arc, with its fits and starts and steps forward and back, ends just about where you'd think it will, if the precise path is unpredictable. Neither is it a surprise that in a story about friendship and teamwork there are stretches where friends are fighting and the team doesn't work. That there will be personal growth — which would not necessarily be the case in a full-season network sitcom — is also pretty much a given. Here and there, issues those of us not in a reuniting pop group might experience are raised. However obvious the narrative nuts and bolts, one feels the defeats and victories, the rifts and reconciliations, on a human level. Admittedly, I am a softy, but you too may be moved.

Creator Meredith Scardino wrote for "Late Show With David Letterman," "The Colbert Report," "At Home With Amy Sedaris" and "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" and is a co-executive producer on "Mr. Mayor," credits that suggest a talent for lateral thinking. The humor is identifiably School of Fey and Carlock. Jokes unfold as the sentence does: "You never forget how to perform — it's like riding a bike into the river to get your husband to pay attention to you." Or come as compressed oxymorons: "That's really sweet short-term thinking." Or appear as an afterthought to a reasonable statement: "I used to have dreams," says Winters' character. "I wanted to be Keith Hernandez but I had to give it up because you can't be another person. The science just isn't there yet."

The eight-episode season keeps the focus on the group. The actresses range in age from 41 (Philipps and Bareilles) to 58 (Pell), with Goldsberry in the middle at 50, though their characters do not — "Can you believe I'm the youngest?" asks Pell — and the show feels aimed at people old enough to remember the 20th century (though not befuddled by the 21st). Crammed with timely and period allusions, it's the sort of humor that may eventually — may now — require footnotes. Nonetheless, young viewers, you need not turn away. You can learn things from your elders' comedy.

The corners of the action are studied with oddities — ads for made-up products, snippets of old videos. There's the She-visor, "the only birth control that's also a hat"; a Spanx-like undergarment called S'Leaks ("You can have a baby in these and then wear them to the club that night"); and swag from a "women's empowerment luncheon at the Victoria's Secret trampoline park." We get glimpses of a show called "American Warrior Singer," "the first show created entirely by a ratings algorithm," in which contestants are beaten up as they try to get a song out; "The Judge Dread House," set in a mansion "where reality judges live among horror pranks"; and "The Maskical," a musical based on Jim Carrey's "The Mask."

The performances are first-rate. As Summer, Philipps mixes excitement and bewilderment and often seems on the edge of tears, whether the situation demands it or not, and taps into a sweetness and desperation that keep her from being merely a dumb blond. Pell (like Fey, a former "Saturday Night Live" head writer) is a pillar of Midwestern competence mixed with self-doubt. And Goldsberry, whose resumé runs from 269 episodes of "One Life to Live" to "The Good Wife" to "Hamilton," where she originated the role of Angelica Schuyler — and who appeared alongside Pell in the "Documentary Now!" episode "Original Cast Album: Co-Op" — is a whirlwind, enacting a grand imitation of grandness as she bounces between person and personality, sometimes humbled, but never quite humble.

Bareilles, an actual pop star who for a time took over the lead in the Broadway musical "Waitress," whose music and lyrics she wrote, and was Mary Magdalene in NBC's 2018 "Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert," has no other significant acting credits, but she's very good. Dawn is more or less the Liz Lemon of "Girls5eva," not without quirks, but the person from whose standpoint the viewer regards the weirdness and measures the stakes. Bareilles' music, which favors piano-based balladry — and forms the soundtrack of the Apple TV+ series "Little Voice," which she co-created — is nothing like the Spice Girls' music but she would have been starting high school around the time "Wannabe" hit, and it must be rattling around inside her somewhere. Only a mannequin could resist that song.

There will be guests: a bewigged Stephen Colbert as a Swedish creator of pop hits ("Typically when I write songs about women I just take a BuzzFeed quiz about Disney princesses"); Fey as an imaginary Dolly Parton; current "SNL" cast member Bowen Yang as an opportunistic fan. Vanessa Williams, who had a number-one single in the '90s, "Save the Best for Last," comes in late as a powerful agent.

Jeff Richmond provides the sprightly score, as he does for most Fey projects — that they're married is beside the point, given how much his music shapes her shows — and the settings for some of the songs. Bareilles wrote a twisted variation on a Bareilles piano ballad, "I'm Afraid (Dawn's Songs of Fears)" and the socko finish, "Four Stars." The thing about ironic drama is that it is actually dramatic, and the thing about comedy is that it can break your heart as easily as drama. It isn't the stated point of "Girls5eva" that music can move you even when the words are comic burble. But it can, and it does.

This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.