The season finale of Happy Endings featured a quintessential Happy Endings joke in Max’s all-male Madonna cover band Mandonna — poppy, slightly but not totally ironic, connected but not quite essential to the main plot of the episode. A treat if ever there were one! But according to executive producers David Caspe and Jonathan Groff, Mandonna almost didn’t happen. “Getting Madonna and her publishers and representatives to agree to let us use ‘Like a Prayer’ was a long process,” Groff tells EW. “So we had to simultaneously prepare for Max being in another cover band. Max was gonna have been in a Sixpence None the Richer cover band and perform ‘Kiss Me,’” he says. Not all the fun would have been lost, though, Caspe says. “The name was gonna be Sex Pants None the Richer.”
