The 13 best musical episodes from non-musical TV shows

Leave it to Dan Harmon and the writing staff of Community to come up with an idea for a musical Christmas episode with shades of Invasion Of The Body Snatchers. Although “Regional Holiday Music” features a pageant performance, it also has spontaneous musical numbers, so it counts. After Jeff rats out the Glee Club to ASCAP for singing unlicensed music, they have a collective nervous breakdown. With the Christmas pageant at stake, Glee Club instructor Mr. Rad (Taran Killam)—who’s “equal parts Hanson and Manson,” according to Jeff (Joel McHale)—plots to recruit the entire study group via an infectious musical virus. It spreads from one character to the next until they all become very invested in making it to regionals. The numbers include Troy (Donald Glover) rapping with Abed (Danny Pudi) about infiltrating Christmas as a Jehovah’s Witness and Annie (Alison Brie) doing a pouty takeoff on “Santa Baby.”

Over the course of its five seasons, The Magicians gave us quite a few great musical moments. There was the epic ensemble number “One Day More” from Les Miserables leading up to Eliot’s duel in Fillory and the mind-meld group singalong to “Under Pressure” in season three, but those just gave us a taste of what the actors and the creative team were truly capable of. The transcendent musical episode “All That Hard Glossy Armor” brought it all together with the kind of bonkers premise The Magicians did so well. The installment finds Margo (Summer Bishil) on a solo quest in the Wandering Desert accompanied by hallucinations of her friends (at least, the ones who can sing), who serenade her with ’80s-rock covers. As Eliot, Hale Appleman was always a standout on the show and never more so than when his musical talents were on full display. Fellow cast members Jade Tailor, Brittany Curran, and Trevor Einhorn also get a chance to show off.

If we thought about all the shows likely to do a musical episode, Grey’s Anatomy wouldn’t have been the first to come to mind, but Shonda Rhimes and her team somehow managed to pull it together. The episode is from the point of view of Callie (Sara Ramirez) after she’s suffered a serious traffic accident. She walks around the hospital singing along with the doctors and nurses as they discuss her treatment while trying to save her and her unborn baby. It’s a jukebox musical, with covers of songs previously featured on the show like Snow Patrol’s “Chasing Cars,” Brandi Carlile’s “The Story,” and The Fray’s “How To Save A Life.” Ramirez’s exceptional vocal skills elevate the songs enough to justify the experiment, but several of the other cast members, including Kevin McKidd and Chandra Wilson, hold their own.

Fringe could get pretty wacky sometimes, and this episode was one of its wackiest detours. Named for a particular strain of marijuana cultivated by Walter (John Noble), it’s a noir detective story within a story that Walter tells Olivia’s niece to cope with his feelings of guilt over lying to his son Peter (Joshua Jackson) about his true origins. The songs include an eclectic selection of covers: Astrid (Jasika Nicole) sings “I Hope I Get It” from A Chorus Line; Broyles (the late, great Lance Reddick) takes on “The Low Spark Of High-Heeled Boys”; Olivia (Anna Torv) gives a heartfelt rendition of Stevie Wonder’s “For Once In My Life”; and let’s not forget the singing corpses dropping a few jaunty bars from “Candy Man.” It’s truly wild, in the best way.

With all the great music that’s been in The Simpsons, it’s surprising they haven’t done many traditional musical episodes that would qualify for this list. We could have gone with the season eight Mary Poppins spoof “Simpsoncalifragilisticexpiala(Annoyed Grunt)cious” but there’s a more recent one that’s even better. “The Star Of The Backstage” is a show about putting on a show, and it’s full of non-diegetic musical numbers that take place offstage. When Marge (Julie Kavner) gets nostalgic about her time as a stage manager in high school, she gets the old drama gang back together to revive her production of Y2K: The Millennium Bug. Marge dreams of being on the stage herself and imagines herself singing with the voice of Kristen Bell (a sneaky tie-in to Bell’s Disney+ show Encore!). There are lots of Broadway references both old and new, from Lin-Manuel Miranda to Rodgers and Hammerstein, and songs inspired by Rent and Wicked. If you get the irony of Kristen Bell having her own “Defying Gravity” moment, then this episode is for you.

Xena: Warrior Princess beat Buffy to the musical punch by three years and secured its place in television history as the first action-fantasy series to do a one-off musical episode, yet it’s not brought up nearly as often. The groundbreaking episode starts off with Xena (Lucy Lawless) and Gabrielle at odds, but when they’re transported to the musical land of Illusia they’re forced to work out their differences through song. All of the music in the episode is original, written by series composer Joseph LoDuca. Lawless, Ted Raimi, and a handful of other cast members did their own singing in the episode, but the vocals for Callisto (Hudson Leick) and Gabrielle were dubbed over by professionals.

There’s no actual medical condition that causes a patient to perceive everyone around them singing and dancing in professionally orchestrated and choreographed musical numbers, but it seems to happen on TV a lot. That’s the premise for this Emmy-winning Scrubs episode, which featured the entire cast performing 10 original songs (pretty impressive for a half-hour comedy). Guest star Stephanie D’Abruzzo, an original cast member in Avenue Q on Broadway (reuniting here with Q songwriters Jeff Marx and Robert Lopez), plays the afflicted patient and the sole audience of the musical shenanigans of the staff at Sacred Heart. Of all the fun songs in this episode the breakout hit has to be “Guy Love,” a catchy duet between J.D. (Zach Braff) and Turk (Donald Faison) about their bromance.

You can tell by the number of references to musicals in this episode that Psych creator Steve Franks knows his Broadway show tunes. In season seven, his dream of taking the offbeat crime procedural into the musical realm finally came to fruition with the help of series composer Adam Cohen. The double-sized episode takes place inside the head of Yang, a psychotic serial killer played by Ally Sheedy. Or maybe it’s the depiction of a case as recounted in song by Shawn (James Roday) and Gus (Dulé Hill)? It’s left kind of vague, and that’s okay. The case involves the duo tracking down an escaped mental patient (guest star Anthony Rapp, no stranger to Broadway himself, having originated the role of Mark in Rent), a former theatrical producer who was committed after burning down a theater while a critic was trapped inside. There are lots of catchy original songs and terrific performances in this two-hour extravaganza. (Roday can sing! Hill can dance!) We also get to see Timothy Omundson show off the musical chops that served him well as King Richard in the short-lived and underrated musical series Galavant.

For the cast of any series that does a musical episode, the experience must be either an exhausting drag or a total blast. Whatever the case was on the set of Lucifer for this one, at least everyone seems like they’re having a really good time. The title refers to the reason behind all the musical numbers—Lucifer’s (Tom Ellis) dad (Dennis Haysbert) has come to Earth and his powers are out of control, causing humans and angels to sing and dance. The dancing is especially high energy, like during the football-field crime scene ensemble number “Another One Bites The Dust.” Since it’s Lucifer, there are plenty of cheeky jokes, including a Police song at the police station, and yes, that is Debbie Gibson in the witness room singing “Every Breath You Take” with Ellis and his velvety voice.

If any show was ripe for a musical episode, you’d think it would be the one filled with characters plucked from Disney animated films. Yet it took nearly all of six seasons for Once Upon A Time to finally get one. It’s even more crazy when you hear how many strong singing voices there are in the cast. Josh Dallas, who plays Prince Charming, is especially gifted, and even sings about how good he sounds in the opening number, “Powerful Magic.” The episode’s main event is the wedding of Emma (Jennifer Morrison) and Hook (Colin O’Donoghue), and the musical gimmick is built around a wish Snow White (Ginnifer Goodwin) makes in a flashback to ensure her daughter’s future happiness. It’s granted in the form of a spell that makes everyone in the Enchanted Forest sing their hearts out. Oz is affected as well, and that’s a good thing because Rebecca Mader gets a chance to channel her inner Elphaba with the song “Wicked Always Wins.” It would have been easy to turn to the old Disney songbook for more familiar musical numbers, but we give the producers credit for bringing on the songwriting team of Alan Zachary and Michael Weiner, who worked with Once Upon A Time composer Mark Isham to come up with eight original songs for the episode.

On the one hand, a musical in space seems like a pretty odd concept; on the other hand, it’s Star Trek, so it’s actually kind of surprising it took this long to get one. The creative team went all out in the penultimate episode of Strange New Worlds’ second season. It’s not just recency bias that puts this episode high on our list; it’s the quality of the original musical numbers and the way they are seamlessly woven into the story. The episode specifically addresses the rules of musicals and the emotions that lead people to sing. See, the reason for all the singing is a subspace improbability field that creates a musical reality around the ship after they try sending a snippet of a song through it (Patti LuPone’s rendition of “Anything Goes,” if you’re curious). Everyone gets a chance to join in, thanks to Auto-Tune, but the stars of the episode are Christina Chong as La’an, who belts out a spectacular “I Want” song, and Celia Rose Gooding’s Uhura, who saves the ship by getting everyone to sing a grand finale ensemble number. And we haven’t even mentioned the Klingons dancing and rapping. Truly, it’s a musical episode for the ages.

When you’ve got a universe full of Broadway stars and Glee alumni on a network known for taking big swings, why not go for it? This crossover extravaganza from the third season of The Flash brings together Barry Allen and Supergirl Kara Danvers (Grant Gustin and Melissa Benoist, the aforementioned Glee cast members) in a musical dream sequence created by a villain-ish guy named Music Meister (played by another Glee alum, guest star Darren Criss). The episode also showcases Flash regulars Jesse Martin and Carlos Valdes in ambitious musical numbers alongside other Arrowverse characters, including Supergirl’s Jeremy Jordan, Legends Of Tomorrow’s Victor Garber, and Arrow’s John Barrowman, all of them supremely talented. There are two original songs here in the midst of jukebox numbers like “Put A Little Love In Your Heart” and “More I Cannot Wish You.” The song “Super Friends,” a duet performed by Gustin and Benoist, was written by Rachel Bloom, creator and star of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. At the end of the episode, we also get Barry singing a solo to Iris in the real world before proposing to her. His song, “Runnin’ Home to You,” is from songwriting duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul (The Greatest Showman, Dear Evan Hanson), who are currently lending their musical talents to Only Murders In The Building.

Could anything else have possibly topped our list? This instantly iconic musical episode of Buffy The Vampire Slayer has everything (you can read that in a Stefon voice if you like): Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) belting out an “I Want” song while on patrol, a kitschy romantic dance number between Xander (Nicholas Brendon) and Anya (Emma Caufield), Spike (James Marsters) singing to Buffy about his aching feelings, a third-act ballet, and, of course, Anya insisting that “it must be bunnies.” All the singing and dancing is inspired by a demon named Sweet (guest star Hinton Battle) who makes people express their feelings through music until they literally combust. The episode is heartfelt, tuneful, and often very funny—like the cameo from writer-producer David Fury as a guy who’s really excited about his dry cleaning, singing “They got the mustard out!” Besides being full of brilliant moments, the episode actually moves the story of season six along. This is where the Scoobies find out that when they raised Buffy from the dead they pulled her out of heaven. In the end, they take their bows and head home after defeating the demon, but nothing will ever be the same.