‘High School Musical: The Musical: The Series’ Creator Answers Your Huge Questions About Season 2’s Finale

In many ways High School Musical: The Musical: The Series feels like a television outlier. It’s not just the many original songs, several of which were written by the show’s young and immensely talented cast. It’s the show’s kindness. Disney+’s sweetest original consistently avoids well-worn TV tropes, always choosing to highlight the goodness and optimism of its teenagers rather than turning them into the bullies of most YA dramas.

That kindness is a conscious choice on the part of series’ creator and executive producer, Tim Federle. Decider spoke to High School Musical: The Musical: The Series‘ head about Season 2’s emotional finale. He also elaborated on EJ (Matt Cornett) and Gina’s (Sofia Wylie) budding romance, the similarities between Olivia Rodrigo and Nini’s rise following “The Rose Song”, and what could be ahead if the show gets a Season 3.

Decider: I first want to talk about EJ and Gina, because once that relationship started happening, I was fully on board. When did you want them to start being a couple?

Tim Federle: Oh, my goodness, I’m not even sure if they are a couple yet. But I think that all the way back in Episode 10 when EJ flew Gina in. As performers, they have extraordinary chemistry, period, and are both really good actors. They’re really fun with one another.

We wanted Gina to go on a journey of figuring out if she belongs in one place, in East High, figuring out if there’s anything still left with Ricky [Joshua Bassett], which I personally think is still not really a full story yet. And ultimately, realizing that EJ is really reforming himself and deciding to be a good guy. He literally shows up for people he cares about. Around the spring break episode, we really wanted to lean into EJ as the kind of friend who shows up.

You touched on something that I’m always impressed by when it comes to High School Musical: Musical: The Series. Ricky’s a great example. He’s with Nini a lot of the time, but he has some chemistry with Gina and Lily [Olivia Rose Keegan]. You explore how characters can have futures with different people, but you guys never devolve into cheating storylines or take the easy path. How hard is it to thread that needle?

It’s hard, but it’s a really fun challenge. It’s hard because we’re never going to be the edgiest teen show on TV. There’s not going to be a Ritalin story. There’s not going to be a vaping story. There’s not even going to be R-rated stuff that I think actually happens when you’re that age. And so you have to look at what the opportunity is.

The obvious one is we are the only show with the word “musical” in its title twice. Let’s be really musical. We would have frankly been even more musical had COVID not slapped us so hard as a production. But when it comes to telling fairly wholesome stories, it’s actually a nice distinction. I’ve heard from childhood friends of mine, who now have 10-year-olds, and they’re like, “Hey, we just watched your show. That actually opened up a whole conversation for us because they had never seen two boys slow dance together.” That, to me, is a really powerful thing that the show’s able to do. It’s one of the reasons I’m really glad Disney is so behind the show, because it’s a platform that screams family in such a big way. It’s really an honor to tell stories that show what all different kinds of families can look like.

At the end of the day cheating, etc, I think every show needs a certain amount of drama and shocks and twists to keep the fans coming back. But the writers tried to set a goal for us: What if we show basically good people basically be good to each other? That is not necessarily always the most dramatic thing, but I think it’s a welcome respite from the rest of the world.

Yeah, it seems very optimistic.

We’ve tried to, and it’s hard to be an optimist in 2021. But we try for a half hour a week to show what the future looks like a little bit. This cast being so authentically young and bright-eyed, it’s powerful when they band together and try to make good decisions to help each other.

I want to talk about another central relationship: Nini and Ricky. They’ve had a rough patch all throughout Season 2. Where do you think their relationship is going to go if there’s a Season 3?

Man, I’m still not over Season 2. That treehouse scene is such a heartbreaker. I don’t know the answer to that. I am not saying that to be cagey. I don’t know if we have a Season 3, so I have to look at what we’ve made in these 22 episodes and say, “Are we proud of this?”

I was really glad that we got the opportunity to tell the story of a healthy breakup, before things got really bad, which is not something I had much of an example of in mass media growing up… I know they get back together, and that was sort of the whole point of Season 1. But day one writers room, pre-pandemic, a year and a half ago, we were like, “I think they can’t stay together this season.” One of the fundamental truths of just being alive, but certainly being young, is that just when you get things exactly where you want them, something changes. We wanted to tell stories that showed how people cope with that as opposed to just have everything go the way they dreamed.

It does echo something about that age group. That’s the first time you start to realize that two people can be good together, but the circumstances just don’t line up. And it’s really heartbreaking.

Yeah, it just doesn’t feel fair. All of those firsts are so powerful. That is the reason I can still cry at Taylor Swift songs about a first breakup. I’m long divorced from that, but I’m like, yes. When you’re 15 and somebody tells you they love you, you are going to believe that. Even when you heal from it and grow up from it, I don’t know if that scar totally goes away.

I feel like it doesn’t. Everyone roughly my age, all the millennials I know, are sobbing over Olivia Rodrigo’s songs. Like why do they hit so hard?

It’s so hard. She taps into something that’s so authentic, that’s extremely relatable at any age. In some ways only becomes more poignant when you get older.

Speaking about Olivia, Nini has her “The Rose Song” narrative this season. She starts to become famous, and there are hints that she may become even bigger. How much was that plot point influenced by Olivia Rodrigo in real life? I know that’s hard to answer since the timelines don’t really match up.

That’s the part that’s so kind of quirky and Twilight Zone-y about it. The honest answer is that we had the idea for “The Rose Song” pre-pandemic. I remember sitting in the office in Los Angeles before we’d even gone to Salt Lake to start shooting Season 2. This idea that Nini was gonna take off in a big way and then have to reconcile with relationships in life in high school, all of that proceeded Olivia’s real life, breakout huge success by months and months. I have the scripts to prove it, which is so crazy.

That being said, yeah, there’s some wild parallels and wild similarities, but in the same way Romeo and Juliet is still a classic love story for a reason. It was impossible to predict, necessarily, that Olivia was going to have this kind of Whitney Houston debut album. But anyone who was close to Olivia or near Olivia or hearing Olivia write those songs, I sort of knew that something someday was going to happen. It all just happened on this crazy condensed timeline as so many things seem to during this pandemic.

Absolutely. That speaks to one of the show’s huge strengths. Your original songs are just out of this world. Like I was looking at the Spotify streams for “The Rose Song”, and it’s at 12 million streams.

Aside from Libby and Josh writing for us, we’ve got this incredible stable of songwriters. It’s so funny because I was in the car the other day on a little mini road trip, and I put on songs to sing in the car, like a random playlist. “Born to Be Brave” came on, and I was like, “Oh, I should listen to this and see if it still moves me.” I was screaming along to my car because I remember when that song was picked and when that moment was constructed in Episode 5 being like, “Let’s do something a little different for Disney, about this boy and a homecoming and feeling stood up by another boy.” We are so lucky with the songs we get in the show. We really are.

At the beginning of the season, you said that for Season 2 you were moving more into original songs. How have you noticed fans have reacted to that?

There’s a lot of love for the original songs. I also think there’s a certain amount of online chatter… We live in an era of instant nostalgia. I think timelines are so condensed because of how reactive we are. I laughed so hard, because somebody the other day wrote something like, “I’m late to the party, but this is what I think about the movie Old.” I’m like, “Late to the party? This came out yesterday.”

We’re all sort of so obsessed with getting our hot takes on the latest thing, which I understand — I’m guilty of it too — that there’s a certain amount of, “Oh, the Season 1 songs were better.” In the same breath, with Season 1, the predominant fan voice online was like, “Don’t screw with our original High School Musical.” We’re very nostalgic for old things until those old things become our new old things. I totally, totally stand by these Season 2 songs that are gonna stand the test of time. Some of them, the final song of the season, “Second Chance”, totally makes me cry. I think it’s so beautiful, and it’s like one of my favorite songs we’ve ever done on the show.

That one is so well done. The cinematography and directing for that song, it’s so well done.

I remember holding my breath the first time I saw the episode cut together by our editor. I just burst into tears when Josh came down the stairs wearing that first costume because I remember being on set that first week of High School Musical Season 1 feeling like I don’t know what I’m doing. We were so in over our heads that we were a launch title along with The Mandalorian, and there was so much pressure. Yet the cast never let me down. This is a cast of people who are just so gifted. So I was really glad that song came out the way it did.

To shift gears a little bit, at the end of the season, Miss Jenn [Kate Reinders] doesn’t reveal the scores from the Alan Menken Awards and everyone decides to drop out of the competition. Why did you decide to go in that direction? And will we ever know the scores?

Maybe we will. If we get to Season 3, that’ll be the first secret thing we reveal. We went in that direction because I think that scores are — am I watching the Olympics? Yes. Do I think that scores are so arbitrary when it comes to the arts? One hundred precent, yes. Most mass media awards, which by the way, I would love to win every single one, don’t get me wrong. But I think most are like a popularity contest, or it’s about the amount of money the studio puts into promoting something. Oftentimes, it’s really ranking the wrong thing.

Especially in high school, like, oh, my god, you have your entire life to be competitive. Please just enjoy this time with these people. It was important to me, in the end, when Miss Jenn flew too close to the sun and got too involved in her own ego with the show, for the kids to show her that we don’t actually care. The whole point of us doing the musical at school is so that for 45 minutes every day, we have somewhere to go where people accept us and love us. This is our safe place. We don’t need to rank it. That sounds like a pretty good message for the young folks out there who watch the show.

It feels like a return to form for what the theater is supposed to be versus — I mean, I love Glee to death and obviously your show always invites Glee comparisons. But that show always became huge season-long arcs about are we going to win this competition? And when you get too competitive, you kind of lose sight of what actually matters.

Yeah, whether that makes for the spiciest TV or not, I don’t know. I think there’s a reason for very, very cutthroat dramatic, so-called terrible TV, in terms of how people treat each other. That’s programming that has clicks and viewers for a reason. I don’t always know how giant of an audience there is for people who basically treat each other well. So there’s that, from just a pure commerce standpoint. But in terms of standing by the stories we’re telling, I’m glad at the end of the day we always try to return to “You Are the Music in Me.”

The cast actually sang that live as a surprise for me and sort of as a thank you for us getting through the pandemic season. And I was like, “Oh my god, this is perfect. We’re gonna put it in the show.” It’s so beautiful, it’s exactly who these kids really are. They really do get together and say, “Wouldn’t it be cool if we play guitar as a thank you?” which is who they actually are as theater kids. That to me is worth more than anything else.

Watch High School Musical: The Musical: The Series on Disney+