Even a show like “High School Musical: The Musical: The Series,” developed with the express aim of capitalizing on an existing franchise, has its artisanal side. It follows a group of high school students staging “High School Musical” as their high school musical. Federle, its showrunner, grew up as a theater kid.

“I know that nothing is more magical than the first time you’re in rehearsal with a group of people and the piano starts,” he said. So he turned down the Auto-Tune and backing tracks and complicated orchestrations and arrangements. “We let their voices crack, we let their voices reach for the notes a bit,” he said.

Each series has to decide how to assimilate song and story. In “Perfect Harmony,” “Katy Keene” and the “High School Musical” series, the music is mostly diegetic, meaning that it occurs within the story — characters sing because they are in rehearsal or at a karaoke bar. “Soundtrack,” a lip-synced series about a varied group of Los Angelenos, and “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” about a young coder who can hear the innermost thoughts of her fellow San Franciscans via popular song, approach things like Broadway musicals. The music just appears, anywhere, anytime.

But those dance breaks and melismatic runs still need to be earned, so strict rules have been drafted for why and how a show’s characters should sing.

Austin Winsberg, the showrunner for “Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist,” wrote a 27-page manifesto stipulating that each song had to reveal character, drive story or at least make a joke. (Also, jazz hands and kick lines were out.) “Soundtrack,” created by Joshua Safran, the showrunner for the second season of “Smash,” constructed the show’s story around the songs. He built playlists for each character and let the songs, typically four to six per episode, guide the plot.

And yet, as Webster admitted, “Sometimes it’s just like, ‘Gosh, wouldn’t it just be really fun to have them sing right now?’”