A listing of characters on Girls5eva.
open/close all folders
Girls5eva
Dawn
Dawn Solano
Played by: Sara Bareilles
The group's "chill one", who now works at her brother's Italian restaurant. She is married to Scott and has a son, Max, with him.
- Audience Surrogate: Dawn is the most normal of Girls5eva and the primary viewpoint character, so she reacts as a layman might react to the crazy goings-on.
- Family Versus Career: A recurring plot thread for Dawn, who has the most stable family life of the four. Prior to Girls5eva's reunion, Dawn and Scott were planning for a second baby. Her revitalized dreams of pop stardom temporarily put that on hold, and Scott is understanding. Then she gets pregnant in the second season and wonders if she should go on tour.
- Happily Married: With Scott. The two have a very healthy relationship and still love one another deeply after years together, even with the pressure around the group's revival.
- Hypochondria: Her doctor's file is the size of a phone book with over a dozen MRI's and convinced too much black licorice was giving her a heart attack.
- Nice Girl: Dawn is a very kind, laid-back and sweet-natured person.
- Only Sane Woman: Dawn is a down-to-earth contrast to Summer's shallowness, Gloria's workaholic tendencies, and Wickie's diva attitude.
- Sexier Alter Ego: Invoked and parodied. After Dawn feels rattled knowing her husband is in the audience, Summer urges her to come up with a fierce alter ego in the vein of Sasha Fierce and Roman Zolanski. Dawn comes up with "Fledge Mulholland", a confident and striking woman with a lurid backstory, and it largely works even if everyone agrees her name is ridiculous.
Summer
Summer Dutkowsky
Played by: Busy Philipps
The "hot one" of Girls5eva, now an unfulfilled and ditzy socialite on the Christian media circuit. She is married to Kev and has a daughter, Stevia, with him.
- Changing Yourself for Love: In season 3 she realizes she is a "relationship chameleon" who models herself after the men in her life, demonstrated when she briefly acts like a biker chick who's really into The Witcher (2019) to match with her current fling.
- Character Development: Though she always keeps her key traits, so far Summer has grown a lot, standing up to her parents and Kev and pushing for what she wants, all while becoming more musically involved. Mentioned in "Tour Mode" when the group discusses their journey so far.
- The Ditz: Summer is not at all book-smart, often missing important references and social cues.
- Dreadful Musician: As she freely admits, Summer is not a great singer, as her voice tends to drift. She notes that her main musical contribution is adding cutting "feminasty" lines at the end of songs.
- Dumb Blonde: Summer is the only blonde member of Girls5eva and is the least bright of all of them because she's never had to think for herself. However, see the entry below.
- Hidden Depths:
- As discussed in "Tour Mode," Summer may seem dumb, but she's the group's "moral center" and can tell what her friends are really feeling. She pushes Gloria to be honest with herself and helps Percy get some closure to make up for how much they terrorized him over the years.
- In "Bomont" she sews her own outfits using material found in her hotel room.
- Season 3 sees Summer attempting to become a successful businesswoman. Although this begins with her falling for an obvious MLM, in the season finale, "New York," Summer puts these skills to good use, successfully manipulating the ticket resale bots to sell out all of Radio City Music Hall.
- I Have This Friend: Summer gets Kev to spend more time with her by claiming it's what Stevia (their distant and disaffected daughter) wants.
- Only Known By Her Nickname: She's only ever referred to as Summer; a throwaway line reveals her real name is actually Ashley and Larry forced to change it to avoid conflicts with their other member Ashley.
- Preacher's Kid: "Can't Wait 2 Wait" reveals that her parents run a well-known traveling ministry. They show up to get her to commit to no non-marital sex after she announces her divorce, even if she's in her late 30's.
- Plastic Bitch: Played With. "Leave A Message If You Love Me" treats it as no big surprise that Summer, the ditziest and most out-of-touch of the group with the most lavish lifestyle, has gotten a lot of work done even if she tries to hide it. When she finally "comes clean" about it to Dawn, the latter is nonplussed and tries to talk her out of doing more cosmetic surgery because it's based around societal pressures. Dawn eventually accepts it about her friend.Summer: Bored! You know what I think I'm gonna do next? They're doing this thing where they put, like, a Slinky under your butt. Leave me alone about it.
Dawn: Okay. But will you just go to a good place next time?
Summer: Fair, because, um... All my threads came out. - Stepford Smiler: She desperately maintains a cheerful front to convince the world she's happily married. The ruse is clear to everyone else, however.
Gloria
Gloria McManus
Played by: Paula Pell, Erika Henningsen (young)
The "hardworking one" of the group. Following Girls5eva's breakup she became a well-regarded but workaholic dentist.
- Armored Closet Gay: Gloria mentions that she tried to go deeper into the closet to deny her sexuality. However, this resulted in mental anguish that manifested itself as an obsession with Steampunk that became too much for even the most hardcore members of the Steampunk community.
- Butch Lesbian: Gloria is a downplayed example. She's not especially masculine in appearance or personality, but she's also the least traditionally feminine of the four. Her brusque personality and workaholic dentist attitude make her come across as butch by comparison.
- Have I Mentioned I Am Heterosexual Today?: In flashbacks, Gloria struggled to pretend that she likes boys. The second season reveals she was good at flirting with guys because she knew it wouldn't amount to anything, but she clams up when she tries to hit on women.Gloria: I'm Gloria and I love performing almost as much as I love boys, boys, boys! Because...I like how men's bodies are flat and then there's...a tube!]
- I Was Quite a Looker: She was very pretty in her initial time with the band but her workaholic tendencies combined with the stress of keeping her sexuality a secret and then her failed marriage made her age very poorly to the point that she looks decades older than the other girls despite being the youngest, in contrast to the other girls who all look more or less the same.
- Married to the Job: Building her dental practice killed her marriage.
- Pet the Dog: She takes pity on Summer and tries to help her maintain the illusion that she's happily married before trying to gently point out that Kev isn't right for her.
- Signature Move: "The Excelsior" was Gloria's trademark kick when she was younger. In the present, she struggles to get her leg high enough.
- Time-Shifted Actor: While the other actresses play the characters both in the present and in flashbacks, Erika Henningsen portrays young Gloria in flashbacks to emphasize how her job aged her.
- Transparent Closet: Gloria was terrible at hiding the fact that she was a lesbian during the group's glory days, refusing to hang out with a contemporary Boy Band and wearing a helmet during a shoot that required kissing a man.
- The Workaholic: Gloria realizes that she threw herself into work to avoid having to socialize with men while a part of Girls5eva. This habit carried over as she started a dental practice and she even worked up to the last minute on her own wedding day.
- Younger Than They Look: Gloria appears much older than her bandmates, but also mentions that she's the youngest member of the group. In real life, Paula Pell is the oldest of the four regulars, nearing sixty years old as of the first season, and is the only one to get a Timeshifted Actor to play her younger self during the group's heyday. This is explained by how she's a workaholic.
Wickie
Wickie Roy (born Lesley Wiggens)
Played by: Renée Elise Goldsberry
Girls5eva's "fierce one", a wannabe diva who initially left the group to go solo. Her showbiz career crashed and burned, however, and she wound up shooting geese at an airport while pretending to be a successful businesswoman.
- Attention Whore: Wickie absolutely craves the spotlight and eagerly seizes upon any attention she gets, even if it's negative.
- Bad Influencer: In the first episode, the women consider fellow member Wickie to be well above their league, since she's become something of a "girlboss" influencer with thousands of Instagram followers, various celebrity interactions, and an up-and-coming handbag business. However, it is shortly revealed that she's a Mock Millionaire with a Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job who was faking her online success. After the group reunites she's the most success-focused since she wants to return to the life of luxury she used to lead in the past and was pretending to lead in the present.
- Breakup Breakout: In-Universe, she broke away from her girl group to go solo, claiming they were holding her back, and clearly intended to be the group's breakout star. However, it didn't work out for her, largely due to her massive ego.
- The Diva: Wickie has the most diva-like personality: she's fierce, driven, craves the spotlight, and enjoys the glamour that comes with being famous. However, she doesn't have the fame to back her attitude up because she was difficult to work with.
- Exact Words: She claims she didn't technically lie about her background, she just used very specific phrasing to make it seem like she had a dysfunctional upbringing. Her mother's in a home (a beautiful house in a wealthy Maryland suburb) and dropped out of school (parachuted out of airplanes at the Air Force academy), her father's not in the picture (he's not in their family photos because he loves taking them), her twin siblings are in and out of the hospital (they're doctors), there was never a Christmas at home growing up (because they were vacationing in the Caribbean), they lived in a van (for 10 days while traveling through New Zealand)...
- Fallen-on-Hard-Times Job: At the beginning of the series, she makes a living shooting geese at Van Nuys Airport and only gets paid by the goose.
- Harsh Talent Show Judge: Snobby diva Wickie is tempted to quit music to be a full-time mean judge on the Immoral Reality Show "American Warrior Singer."
- It's All About Me: Astonishingly so. Wickie is completely self-absorbed and seems to have almost no awareness of or interest in the world outside of herself.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: It takes a while, but Wickie does finally start to care about other people. She gets into a genuine romantic relationship and eventually learns to do what's best for Girls5eva as a group, not just herself. At the end of Season 3, she tells Nance Trace that she and the girls are a package deal, instead of taking a lucrative offer for herself.
- Large Ham: As befits a diva, Wickie is the hammiest of the group, often breaking into song for single words and trying to out-do the others. And she's so self-involved she once thought she was having sex with someone who wasn't there and didn't notice.
- Mock Millionaire: Wickie has been pretending to be a successful and glamorous businesswoman. It turns out that she's just been pretending; her job at an airport allowed her to fake owning a private jet.
- Narcissist: Wickie is exceedingly self-absorbed.
- She doesn't even notice that she was dating two guys (who kept switching out) at the same time until they revealed it to be a TikTok prank.
- Among the reasons she got booted out of the business was refusing to let her backup dancers wear makeup or play venues that also held sports.
- Person as Verb: They refer to going solo as "Wickie-ing" after Wickie unsuccessfully tried to break out by herself in the 2000s.
- Riches to Rags: She was once very wealthy and lived in a huge home but her solo career and planned film career tanking and being shut out by the industry due to her massively oversized ego caused her to lose everything, leading her to now get by shooting geese at an airport.
- Secretly Wealthy: Wickie made a big show of acting like she came from a rough upbringing, but it turns out she comes from a normal, loving, well-off family. She lied about her background because it was more marketable.Dawn: All this talk about your "hardscrabble life" is bullshit.
Wickie: Is it? My family is very good at Scrabble. It's hard. Look at the board! All those hooks and extensions? Hard Scrabble. - Small Name, Big Ego: Wickie continues to act like a diva despite her time in the spotlight having ended decades ago and living in near poverty in the present. Unlike most cases of this, she is legitimately very talented but her ego massively outweighs her success.
Ashley
Ashley Gold
Played by: Ashley Park
The "fun one" of Girls5eva, who died in a swimming pool accident in '04.
- The Heart: The others remember her as the band's glue.
- Posthumous Character: Ashley died in 2004 and is only seen in flashbacks. Her absence partially convinces the surviving members to reunite.
- Undignified Death: Ashley died after swimming off the side of an infinity pool.
- Virtual Celebrity: The group obtains a hologram of Ashley to perform alongside them, but it's glitchy and ends up reading out Gloria's emails in public.
Percy
Played by: John Lutz
A Girls5eva prank victim who becomes their tour driver and assistant in season 3.
- Extreme Doormat: Wickie orders him around excessively, and he takes several fumbles for the group, but takes it all in stride.
Family Members
Scott
Scott
Played by: Daniel Breaker
Dawn's husband and father of her son. Scott is a guidance counselor who is a little unprepared to deal with his wife's sudden desire for pop stardom.
- Armor-Piercing Question: Gives a nice one to Wickie: "When did singing become about winning to you?"
- Hidden Depths: Wickie is stunned to discover that not only does Scott have a singing voice that puts anyone in the group to shame but doesn't care about sharing it beyond the occasional karaoke bar stop.
- Innocently Insensitive: An offhand comment he makes before a performance ("Remember that Max and I love you!") sends Dawn into a spiral about her capability to become a musician.
- Understanding Boyfriend: Played With in Scott. He and Dawn love each other, but he dislikes living with Wickie, is dismayed that Girls5eva's comeback interferes with their longterm plan for a family, and is insecure that he won't be a suitable partner for Dawn if she becomes famous again. However, he accepts that it's what Dawn wants and tries to be more understanding.
Max
Max
Played by: Julius Conceicao
Dawn and Scott's five year old son. He's a "New York Lonely Boy," i.e a New York kid who grows up with no siblings and no friends his own age, and as a result is more comfortable around adults than other kids.
- Adorably Precocious Child: Parodied and downplayed at the same time. The concept of a "New York Lonely Boy" and the song with the same name describe kids with absurdly grown-up interests and purely adult friends — and Max does have some very non-childlike interests; he'd rather go look at fedoras and fountain pens than have ice cream (at least after he learns that they don't have Earl Grey-flavored ice cream), and he watches Chernobyl instead of cartoons, but he's still very much a kid about these things. For excample, while he's excited about getting a fountain pen, he uses it mostly to draw pictures of his Imaginary Friend.
- Imaginary Friend: He has one named Oscar, who works as a doorman.
Kev
Kev
Played by: Andrew Rannells
Summer's husband, a former boy band member turned media reporter in Tampa.
- Ambiguously Gay: Kev is a former boy band member, has very stereotypical gay mannerisms, seems very disinterested in Summer, and is played by openly gay Andrew Rannells. Gloria strongly believes he is gay; when Summer (with whom he has a daughter) presses him about it he dodges the question.
- Armored Closet Gay: In an attempt to find an outlet for his repressed sexuality, Kev throws himself into rehabilitating hermit crabs.
- Eye Scream: Summer mentions that his bangs actually caused his covered eye to turn inverted.
- Hidden Depths: Kev initially seems like a self-absorbed ex-boy bander, but it turns out that he's dedicated his life to rehabilitating hermit crabs in Florida. He's still a crappy husband, though, and Summer eventually divorces him.
- Manchild: When tasked with caring for his daughter Stevia in season 2, Kev reveals himself to be incapable of even caring for himself.
- Mistaken for Cheating: Despite a multitude of suspicious purchases, including a trip to the Florida Keys and a bulk order of condoms, Kev isn't cheating on Summer. He's instead rehabilitating hermit crabs.
- Speed Sex: Invoked. To avoid having actual sex with Summer, he fakes a climax as soon as he kisses her and rolls away.
- Timeshifted Actor: An uncredited young boy portrays young Kev in a cereal ad in "A.I.R.P.I.G.", but is still voiced by Andrew Rannells.
- Transparent Closet: Kev insists he's heterosexual and Summer desperately hopes it's true, but everyone else can see that they're trying to maintain a fracturing fantasy.
Stevia
Stevia
Played by: Penelope Richmond
Kev and Summer's preteen daughter, a disaffected influencer.
- Bad Influencer: Stevia's attitudes towards social media are intended to creep the audience out. She is introduced filming an 'unboxing' video and reacts negatively and woodenly when Dawn gives her a gift, since any endorsement must be done through the proper channels. Oh, and she's a preteen.
Nick
Nick
Played by: Dean Winters
Dawn's brother, boss, and landlord, who runs multiple shady businesses.
- Dirty Old Man: Dirty middle-aged man, but he's got a long history of dating younger women, and compares notes with Wickie on the matter.
Chris and Kris
Chris and Kris Dutkowsky
Played by: Neil Flynn and Amy Sedaris
Summer's parents, who run a traveling ministry.
- Happily Married: Summer's parents might be old-fashioned, but they're blissfully in love with each other even after 40 years of marriage.
- Huge Guy, Tiny Girl: Kris is played by Amy Sedaris, who stands at only 5'1, while Chris is played by the 6'5 Neil Flynn.
- Hypocrite: They pretended to be a pure couple who scorned pre-marital sex and try to pass that onto their late-30's daughter after she gets a divorce. In truth they not only had a lot of sex but also slept around, with Kris even commenting it was a miracle Summer wound up being her father's daughter. When Summer calls them out on trying to make her adhere to purity ring culture despite that, they comment that they understood the sin of their ways.Kris: It's bad out there, babe, and part of me sincerely worries that we might have whοre genetics.
- Meaningful Name: They are a couple of Christian preachers named Chris and Kris.
Dana and Carmen
Dana and Carmen Wiggens
Played by: Ron Canada and Adrian Lenox
Wickie's well-off parents.
- Good Parents: Played for laughs. Wickie never wanted for anything growing up and they were always very supportive of her and willing to bail her out of trouble. In the present day Wickie complains that if they had been dysfunctional stage parents she might have become more successful as a result of the pressure.
- Happily Married: They've been married for several decades and are still happy together.
Other Characters
Li'l Stinker
Li'l Stinker
Played by: Jeremiah Craft
An up-and-coming young rapper who samples "Famous 5eva" for his new song.
- Black and Nerdy: He opens the series mimicking bird calls for his latest single, implying he's a serious birder.
- Meaningful Rename: Played for laughs. Between the first and eighth episodes rapper Lil Stinker rebranded himself Stinker because he's ready to take on more mature material.
- Small Role, Big Impact: He has very little screentime, but his opening decision to sample "Famous 5eva" kickstarts the whole plot.
Larry
Larry Plumb
Played by: Jonathan Hadary
Girls5eva's former manager, an exploitative man who gets in the way of their attempted comeback.
- Dirty Old Man: Larry seems to believe that "air honking" women's breasts is perfectly acceptable now that he's gone through mandatory sensitivity training.
- Hate Sink: Not a scene he's in goes by where Larry isn't being a colossal, sexist jerk who the girls rightfully loathe even being in the same room as.
- Jerkass: Larry didn't tell the girls they had royalty money from Li'l Stinker, constantly makes harassing comments, and screws them over when they try to use their old material to stage a comeback.
- Politically Incorrect Villain: He's constantly making sexist remarks and his songs for the girls reflect his misogyny.
- Sitcom Archnemesis: After Girls5eva decides to separate from him, Larry's role in the show basically becomes this. Usually when he shows up he represents an obstacle for the group to overcome, such as in Season 2 when he starts managing the rival group Collab.
Alf Musik
Alf Musik
Played by: Stephen Colbert
A reclusive and multi-awarded Swedish-American songwriter who was responsible for writing Girls5eva's old songs.
- Berserk Button: Don't imply that David Guetta is on his level or an acceptable substitute for him.
- My Greatest Second Chance: Inverted. He is hilariously successful and agrees to help the protagonists out because they were his only clients who didn't make it big.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: Alf Musik is a parody of Max Martin, a prolific Swedish songwriter and producer responsible for some of the world's biggest hits.
- Reclusive Artist: In-Universe. Alf Musik has won every music award there is multiple times and has written for many A-list musicians. Despite this, he is notoriously hard to get ahold of because he is a recluse. After Girls5eva manage to get an audience with him, he agrees to write them a song because they are his only failure.
- Serial Spouse: He has had nine failed marriages.
Nance
Nance Trace
Played by: Vanessa Williams
A high-powered manager.
- Establishing Character Moment: She's introduced powerwalking through a radio convention while wrangling several celebrities.
Chuck Dennis
Played by: John Early
A state senator from West Virginia.
- Straw Character: A staunch pro-lifer, he intrudes on Dawn's OB-GYN appointment as a "Fetal Citizen Advocate", forbids Dawn from looking at her ultrasound because it's a photograph of a naked child, and brings his creepy sexless wife everywhere.
Gray Holland
Played by: Thomas Doherty
A world-famous British pop star who befriends Paula in season 3.
- I Just Want to Be Normal: He's burned out by being a world-famous superstar and misses normalcy. He frequently escapes his team to eat at an Italian chain and relishes in the chance to hang with the struggling protagonists.
- No Celebrities Were Harmed: A British pretty boy with floppy dark hair, throngs of screaming fangirls, and a 'sensitive' image — he's the show's send-up of Harry Styles.
