ZOEY’S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST Boss Previews Zoey’s ‘Journey of Recovery’ in Season 2

The heartwarming, utterly charming (and occasionally emotionally destroying), NBC dramedy ZOEY’S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST is back on Tuesday, January 5 (at 8/7c), as Zoey (Jane Levy) adjusts to a world without her father, Mitch (Peter Gallagher).

“The [premiere] episode takes place six weeks after Zoey’s father has passed away,” creator Austin Winsberg previews. “And it is Zoey’s first time re-entering the world after her dad is gone, and trying to re-calibrate the process of [grieving]. And coming back into the world, she discovers that things were maybe not exactly the way she left them. And there have been some changes afoot and new things that she’s going to have to deal with in her work life, her romantic life, and her family life. So those are kind of the big things that we focus on moving forward.”

For the Clarke family, who spent so much of season 1 care-taking for (and preparing to say goodbye to) Mitch, facing a world without him is something they’re all adjusting to in unique ways.

“David and Emily have a new addition to the house with baby Miles,” Winsberg says. “So that’s a big part of it: now there’s a baby in [their] world, on top of everything else. Maggie’s having to deal with a lot of end of life stuff with Mitch, business and financial [matters]. And all four of them are trying to figure out how do they move on now? And how do we be in the world? What do we want?”

“Death forces us all to sort of reevaluate,” he continues. “That’s very true for David, as we will see in some upcoming episodes. Zoey’s still very much in the grief stage with her dad. Maggie is trying to navigate being alone after being with the same person for over 40 years. So the whole season for the whole family is all about the various ways in which they deal with their grief and try to create new identities for themselves, when the person that was so meaningful to all of them is no longer there.”

After shaping season 1 around Zoey’s newfound powers and coming to terms with her dad’s illness (and eventual death), the plethora of stories surrounding grief allowed the ZOEY’S writers to break from the established format for the show’s sophomore season.

“There was a lot of discussion about, ‘Do we need to create a new emotional obstacle, like a dying dad?'” Winsberg recalls. “‘Do we give Joan cancer, do we go down one of those roads?’ And I just felt, for me, so much of the show is from my own experience and trying to be true to what I went through.”

For season 2, “Zoey’s journey of recovery and the messy path that takes—and the fact that everybody’s grief journey is different—[it] felt like dividing Zoey’s grief into different chunks in different sections over the season was a way to give us structure,” he continues. “[It was] a way to have emotional episodes, but also have moments of joy and moments of comedy, and not be living in the sadness all the time. I felt like if we created an artificial new obstacle, that would ring false to me. So what I felt was more important was cracking Zoey’s emotional arc; once I sort of found the pieces of the emotional arc, that felt more like a cohesive season idea we could go through without manipulating the audience with a false new tragedy.”

ZOEY’S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST, Season Premiere, Tuesday, January 5, 8/7c, NBC

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• ZOEY’S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST Post-Mortem: Austin Winsberg on the Rule-Breaking Number and What’s to Come in Season 2
• ZOEY’S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST Boss Teases Max’s New Lease on Life, ‘Authentic’ Mitch Storyline
• ZOEY’S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST Team on the Love Triangle Reveals, What Comes Next
• ZOEY’S EXTRAORDINARY PLAYLIST: Jane Levy and Austin Winsberg Tease Jane’s Very Musical ‘Glitch’
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