The War on Intellectual Property
Though discussions of intellectual property and fair use are in the limelight following the very public rise and fall of Barlow and Bear’s The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical, this incident is the consequence of a long-simmering cultural movement toward the disregard of a writer’s ownership and control of their own work, instead tolerating, and even celebrating, the misuse of someone’s intellectual property.
In the event that you have been living under a rock for the past two months, public discourse has been rampant surrounding the Tik-Tok phenomenon turned surprise musical theater hit, The Unofficial Bridgerton Musical, created by young musical collaborators Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear. The Netflix romantic drama, one of the platform’s biggest hits, became a nearly-overnight sensation during the COVID-lockdown, due to its relevant social commentary, racially diverse cast, and a ton of steamy sex scenes focused on the female gaze. What started out as a singular viral TikTok of Barlow performing what was then entitled “Daphne’s Song”, eventually thrust its two young creators, Barlow and Bear, into superstardom, beating out Stephen Schwartz and Andrew Lloyd Webber for a musical album Grammy and selling out the Kennedy Center for a one-night only, for-profit concert… all without a license or legal permission from Netflix.
I have wanted to write an article about this situation for many weeks now, but I was pondering how to reframe the discussion as something other than a rant against Barlow and Bear. As they are writers themselves, I felt frustrated that the protection of other artists’ intellectual property was clearly their very last priority: an acute betrayal of the “writer’s code” that I understood as a sixth grader, triple-checking that the Peter Pan novel was in the public domain before I even began to write a musical inspired by it. However, I knew the last thing the internet ever needs is another passion-fueled rant. Therefore, I set the idea to the side until I came across similar concerns in other media I was consuming. This content helped me to realize that this was not a one-in-a-million incident. On the contrary, I began to recognize similar, albeit more subtle, problems in three specific scenarios, all escalating up to the mess that the Bridgerton musical became.
Riverdale
I hadn’t actually seen the teen murder mystery drama series Riverdale until very recently, but I had been aware of its now-infamous musical episodes for a while. As the majority of the show follows young characters through high school, most every season includes an episode where the leading cast participates in a school play, such as Carrie or Heathers. The episode will often loosely weave the plot of the musical into the plot of the season, and the characters will sing select songs from the original musical both within and outside of a performance context. It’s often very campy and very dark, which undoubtedly fits the tone of the show as a whole. The first alterations I noticed were the omission of strong language. To take a rather extreme example, in the Next to Normal episode, lyrics in the song “Everything Else” were changed from the original “Mozart was crazy/ Flat f***ing crazy/ Batsh*t, I hear” to the prime-time television ready “Mozart was crazy/ Totally crazy/ Bonkers, I hear”. On some level, I understand this choice. The writing team on Riverdale loved Next to Normal and it fit well into the story they were trying to tell of Alice’s grief over her daughter’s recent death, but there was a lot of language that needed to be sifted out to make it possible. As a writer, however, even this seemingly benign change troubles me. Coming from someone who would hear this sentiment from other playwrights and find it pretentious until I began writing myself, I truly believe a good writer will focus on every stroke they include on the page, down to whether they choose a comma or an ellipses to separate two clauses. In other words, if I put an expletive into any show I am writing, it has been pondered over and an intentional decision was made to include it. If someone were to produce that show without the use of that word, even with my permission, it would still be a disappointment to me as perhaps the only person who can fully understand why it was included in the first place. More problematically, however, Riverdale did not stop at the removal of explicit language. For example, in the song “Candy Store” from the Heathers musical episode, the writers threw out “Let your mommy fix you a snack/ Or you could come smoke, / Pound some rum and coke / in my Porsche with the quarterback” in favor of the supposedly cleaner “Let your mommy fix you ice cream / Or come ride with me, / And tonight we’ll be / dirty dancing with the football team”. To add insult to injury, though the lyrics were cleaned up, the underage high school characters performed what I’ve often seen described as “PG-13 stripper choreography” for the number. For a show that includes plot lines revolving around murder, suicide, prostitution, teen drug use, and even human organ-harvesting religious cults, a line about “pounding rum and coke” seems like the least of a network’s worries.
High School Musical: The Musical: The Series
This is a show I absolutely love. I have been a fan of HSMTMTS since the first episode came out, and I have followed it religiously through season 3. However, no TV show is above reproach. The first season takes a lot of big swings, including several that I absolutely adored, such as a gay man playing Sharpay in the (titular?) show-within-the-show. However, one such swing that epically missed, in my opinion, was the drama teacher, Miss Jen, asking her student, Ashlyn, to write an eleven o’clock emotional power ballad for her character, Miss Darvis. Though this was very clearly written in as an opportunity to give the enormously talented actress Julia Lester her chance in the spotlight, the fact that they added an entirely new, self-reflective song (that, by the way, I cannot possibly imagine ever fitting Miss Darvis’s eccentric character) into a licensed show with no consequences whatsoever was a step too far. The show framed this song’s inclusion as a beautiful moment where a young talent blows the audience away with her songwriting and vocal prowess. I have watched the first season of this show at least three times, and this plot line irks me regardless of how often I see it. To give credit where credit is due, however, the show does seemingly acknowledge their mistake in the second season when an actress yet again writes a new song for her character, but it is ultimately cut because the cast learns it will disqualify them from the Alan Menken high school theater competition if they violate copyright laws. Though this makes me more forgiving of the original sin, the damage, to some extent, was still done in the first season’s glorified portrayal of copyright infringement.
Ratatouille: The Musical
This most recent infraction is, again, one of which I am generally forgiving. What started out as a silly, viral soundbite with the lyrics, “Remy the Ratatouille, the rat of all my dreams”, absolutely exploded, with seemingly the entirety of musical-theater Tik-Tok banding together to write songs, create Playbills, and design costumes for a pipe-dream Ratatouille musical. After it gained enough traction at the height of the COVID pandemic, a limited-run Zoom concert with Broadway talent was created, with all of the funds benefiting struggling artists through The Actors Fund. In my mind, there are several key distinctions between this Ratatouille musical and the Barlow and Bear Bridgerton album. First and most importantly, before the Ratatouille musical was produced in any way outside of Tik-Tok’s one-minute forum, express permission was obtained from Disney, and all of the proceeds were donated to artists in a time of especially great need. The Bridgerton musical obtained no permission for its Kennedy Center performance from Netflix, and all of the proceeds seemed to go to Barlow and Bear, with no obvious charity or cause attached. Finally, while the Ratatouille musical was a great collaboration binding together the many young people of musical theater Tik-Tok, the Bridgerton musical was clearly a closed collaboration between two artists seeking to get famous and make money. However, even at the time of its inception, I was still concerned about the precedent the Ratatouille musical was setting. Even if this particular project was relatively benign, or even helpful, I believe it created a culture, on Tik-Tok in particular, that allowed space for what the Bridgerton musical would become.
Though I understand the decisions made by creators trying to cross-pollinate in the arts, I still very much believe that even these small missteps have nurtured a public disregard for the rights of a writer over their intellectual property. As a culture, we need to reclaim and celebrate the creation of original work, as well as ensure that we are treating the intellectual property of others with proper care.
Originally published September 27, 2022