For Your Emmy Consideration: "Marriage Is A Dungeon"
Cred. Steve Appleford
Ginny & Georgia has become something of a runaway hit for Netflix. The show manages to blend the talking antics of Gilmore Girls with 90210-level drama. Its second season premiered in January of this year and Lili Haydn and Ben Bromfield, the series’ co-composers, were given the opportunity to write a musical for the high schoolers to perform in the series. A show within a show. Haydn and Bromfield were thrilled to put their spin on Wellington, a winking Jane Austen nod to Netflix’s other massive hit, Bridgerton.
Not only were Haydn and Bromfield tasked with writing a compelling musical, their songs needed to stand on their own and be mirrors to the interpersonal drama that is playing out for the characters. The catchiest song of the show-within-the-show is “Marriage Is A Dungeon.” It’s performed by Lady Blaire (Max) and Josephine"(Bracia). Their characters, the song, and the costume design would feel perfectly at home in the 1997 version of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella.
Cred. Amanda Barnes
Haydn and Bromfield’s inspiration for “Marriage Is A Dungeon” came from an unexpected place: Haydn’s grandmother’s sister’s deathbed. In those final moments, she said, with an ominous shaking finger, “You think you know, but you don’t know. Marriage is a dungeon.”
Those sentences would be word for word used in their song for Ginny & Georgia. Haydn and Bromfield blended their love for West Side Story, The Last Five Years, and other beloved musicals to create the uber-catchy, earworm that is “Marriage Is A Dungeon.” The song has also taken a life of its own on TikTok. More than users simply uploading clips of the peformance from the show, there are videos where the song is set to scenes from Disney’s Tangled, HBO’s The Tudors, Netflix’s Stranger Things. There are also TikToks of people jamming out in their kitchens, singing it in their bedrooms, and spoofing it to American Psycho. It speaks to what Haydn referred to in our interview as the little campaign that could. “Marriage Is A Dungeon” is spreading like wildifre because, not only is it immensely catchy, but it speaks to the larger societal pressures of marriage, beauty, and power imbalances.
Listen to the full interview with co-composers Lili Haydn and Ben Bromfield below:
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