The CW’s New Docuseries ‘March’ Largely Succeeds At Its Difficult Mission: Proving That Marching Bands Are Cool, Actually

Like thousands of people across North America, I spent a significant portion of my adolescence playing in a marching band. In 1986, after a year of private flute lessons, I joined the Regina Lions Junior Band, in my hometown of Regina, Saskatchewan; I was (not to brag) first chair in the concert band and competed in small wind ensembles at recitals around the province. But membership in the band was mostly about marching. We participated in every available parade, and each year we would learn a show, probably of the kind that appeared in your mind’s eye as soon as you read the phrase “marching band”: while playing a program of four different musical pieces, we would move in lines and loops around a football field, one formation giving way to another, while the audience in the stands sat rapt and wondered how we did it (or so we imagined). What does it take not just to put on such displays but to keep the organization running — forgive me — harmoniously? Marching bands are rich with dramatic potential that TV has ignored for far too long…but maybe that’s about to change.

On The CW’s new docu-soap series March, premiering tonight, viewers go inside The Marching Storm of Prairie View A&M University, an HBCU in Prairie View, Texas. (Notable alumni include Megan Thee Stallion and Mr. T; the pilot episode does not mention them, nor does it inform us whether either of them was in the band.) We join the Storm in the fall of 2021: the band is preparing for Homecoming — a big event on any campus under normal circumstances, but particularly this year, students having just returned to campus for the first time since COVID sent them all home the previous year. We meet, among others, Kaylan, captain of the Black Foxes dance team, who’s trying to determine who may be a fitting successor after she graduates; Nehemiah, who wants to go out for drum major next year, but may need to learn to give direction with more diplomacy; Cardavion and Martayvia, who both got kicked out of the band for fighting (and Martayvia was Piccolo Section Leader!!!); and Dr. Timmey Zachery, Director of Bands, who has to preside over the hundreds of individuals, each with their own story, who make up his ensemble. Will members put their petty concerns on hold to work together and make sure the Storm slay at Homecoming?!

In dramatizing students who are passionate about the performing arts, March joins a long TV tradition that encompasses everything from Fame to Glee to High School Musical: The Musical: The Series. A marching band learning a half-time show and a cast learning a musical or a hip hop crew learning choreography are going to progress through the same beats. You suck at first; everyone bumbles along good-naturedly; mastery develops slowly; crushes ignite; an authority figure gets frustrated that the kids aren’t taking things seriously enough and flips out to scare them straight; and before you know it, the time has come to put on the big show! These formulas work for a reason: why else would there be five Step Up movies and a spinoff series (Step Up: High Water) heading into its third season on Starz?! In a scripted context, giving the impression of a full ensemble in your climactic marching band scene might require more extras than is required for even the most ambitious of high school musicals, but we’re also living in the age of CG; just put some realistic-ish figures in the blurry background! That goes double for showing the band’s motions on the field: zoom way out to move your dot-people around in whatever shapes you need. And you know what will make this even easier to sell? EVERYONE’S IN UNIFORM.

When we’re not watching students in narratives about the arts, we tend to watch them in narratives about sports. Here again, a marching band setting is perfectly suited to stand alongside — or, if it were up to me, supplant — athletics. Marching band teaches all the same qualities we’re told students learn from playing sports: discipline, persistence, determination, teamwork. “But what about the thrill of facing off against adversaries and beating them in punishing but fair competition?” Bands compete too! Ask me about the summer of 1989, when the Regina Lions Junior “A” Band went six for six in a tour of marching band competitions around the American Midwest! You’ll be sorry you did! But it was great!!! And I can assure you that no one in any of our competitions was ever at risk of a traumatic brain injury or otherwise career-ending catastrophe. (Again: not to brag.)

Trust me, I know that marching band has become shorthand for irredeemable dorkiness. The movie American Pie did a lot of damage to the community (“This one time, at band camp…”). Even before that, though, the uniform styles foisted upon us were also a challenge: no one looks cool in quasi-military epaulets or a vinyl hat with a plume sticking out of it. But our current TV landscape has room for all kinds of settings. Semi-professional wrestling is pretty goofy, but we’ve got Heels. Bowling is both a mainstay of children’s birthday parties and the topic around which this spring’s Smallwood will revolve. We got the feature film Drumline; we got unscripted series Bama State Style, Marching Orders, and now March, but if I’m being honest, none of them quite captured the experience as I remember it, and none of them (including March, so far) have enough band. We need a scripted drama that braids the soaring emotional storytelling of Friday Night Lights with the bombastic musicality of Fame, set among the members of an HBCU’s marching band whose on-field dance breaks regularly go viral on social media, because it’s 2022 and it’s time to dispel some stereotypes: marching bands are cool, actually, and the world needs to know.

Television Without Pity, Fametracker, and Previously.TV co-founder Tara Ariano has had bylines in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, Vulture, Slate, Salon, Mel Magazine, Collider, and The Awl, among others. She co-hosts the podcasts Extra Hot Great, Again With This (a compulsively detailed episode-by-episode breakdown of Beverly Hills, 90210 and Melrose Place), Listen To Sassy, and The Sweet Smell Of Succession. She’s also the co-author, with Sarah D. Bunting, of A Very Special 90210 Book: 93 Absolutely Essential Episodes From TV’s Most Notorious Zip Code (Abrams 2020). She lives in Austin.