Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade: Mean Girls

This is a little less "live," but I usually like to share my feelings on the CBS "performances" as well. I say "performances" because there's usually more than one, but this year, all we got is Mean Girls. And that's fine, I actually like Mean Girls, I think it's one of the better movie adaptations we've had in recent years. That may be partially because I wasn't super familiar with the movie before the show came out or because I'm just super into shows set in highschools, but in general, there are a ton of parts of Mean Girls that I like. Unfortunately, the part they decided to perform was not one of those.

To be fair, where Mean Girls thrives is generally in it's power ballad solos. The songs that bring down the house like Burn or I'd Rather Be Me, don't necessarily lend themselves to live performances. However, in general, they've been really good about showing a diverse set list in their public appearances. They did Apex Predator on Good Morning America, I'd Rather Be Me on Jimmy Fallon, Stupid With Love on the View, and last year they gave one of the best performances of the parade with Fearless. To be honest, one of their weakest performances (in my opinion) was on the Tony Awards where they did Here's Where You Belong and Meet the Plastics. Here's Where You Belong is (in my opinion) one of the very few bad songs in the show and furthermore is hardly representative of the characters or themes of the show (as I think these live performances should strive to be) and the only redeeming feature of that performance was Meet the Plastics. So imagine my dismay when I saw that the ONLY CBS performance we were getting was Mean Girls and the ONLY song they were performing was Here's Where You Belong...again.

I mean, look, the cast is talented, the dancing is nice, the performance was solid, it's fine, whatever. But the song doesn't showcase any of the fantastic women who are in this show, it didn't highlight their recent cast additions (such as the fabulously talented and age appropriate Renee Rapp as Regina George), it didn't even (I think) play on the recognizable moments people would know from the movie. They just picked a mediocre song with some kinda cool dancing and no character growth. It was a wasted opportunity on so many levels and a kind of disappointing end to this year's parade performances.