Season 1, Episode 5 features the song "Tribulation", sung by Kristin Chenoweth. She was able to do the entire 4-minute song in only one take.
In an August 2021 interview with Terry Gross on the National Public Radio program "Fresh Air," cocreator Cinco Paul said that he had the first inspiration for Schmigadoon around twenty-five years previously while watching the 1981 horror comedy An American Werewolf In London--"one of my favorite movies. And it opens with, you know, two friends hiking through the wilderness, and they're hiking over the countryside. And I suddenly thought, wow, the opening to this is very much like the opening to Brigadoon. And then I thought, what if these two modern guys, instead of stumbling on a town that has a werewolf, stumbled on a town that was in a musical? And that was the germ of the idea, but I didn't really know what to do with it, so it was one of those that I just filed away. But what really cracked it for me was, oh, instead of two friends, it should be a couple so that it is more of a romantic comedy and it can be more about what does love mean? What's true love really mean? I think that's why for 25 years nothing happened with it, because it was--it needed that addition to really crack it."
Though the show skewers general tropes of all musicals, the first season seems to lean heavily on five, Brigadoon, Oklahoma, Carousel, The Music Man, and The Sound of Music. Brigadoon, Oklahoma, and Carousel were on Broadway during the 1940s; The Music Man and The Sound of Music both started their Broadway runs in the 1950s and ran into the '60s.
The show's title is a satirical spin-off of the Alan Jay Lerner & Frederick Loewe musical "Brigadoon" first performed on Broadway in 1947. The musical was later adapted into the film A Lenda dos Beijos Perdidos (1954).
The title of this series, "Schmigadoon!" (as well as the promotional title of the second season, "Schmicago") employs a linguistic principle called "reduplication." The particular form of reduplication used here, known as schm-reduplication, has roots in a Yiddish practice of dismissing or derogating a word or phrase by repeating the word with a schm- sound added to the second instance. Some classic examples of how this principle has found its way into English include: "fancy-schmancy" (as a way of undercutting something's actual fanciness), "cancer-schmancer" (as a way of trying to overcome the fear and gravity inherent in the subject of cancer), and "Joe Schmoe" (indicating an ordinary, average person).