One would have to have taken up residence under a mighty big rock not to know Glee’s basic premise, in which a pretty but witless Spanish teacher takes over his high school’s glee club, which is filled with misfits of every archetype—the overachieving girl, the doe-eyed jock with a heart of gold, the effeminate gay guy, the sassy black girl, and a few others designed to have as minimal screen time as possible. We’ve seen them all before. It’s as if someone spliced up film from Election and Bring It On and every other teen movie of the last fifteen years and dropped them into a fishbowl and asked the writers to draw out a few at random.
There’s some nonsense in the story that involves Jane Lynch as a rival cheerleading coach, and there are too many pregnancy plots and totally illogical loopholes surrounding the pregnancies. The show has too many preposterous character reversals and this-would-never-happen-in-television-much-less-real-life story choices that send Glee off into the Lost realm of absurdist storytelling. They might as well throw in a nuclear bomb and some time travel and call it a day, and they’re only a half-dozen episodes into the first season.
But my real objections are as follows.
1. The musical numbers in Glee are inconsistent. They're inconsistent with the talent level of actual high school students, for one thing. The kids get thrown some sheet music and without even so much as glancing at it, they’re all jammin’ and producing professional tracks destined for hitdom. Even in the first couple of episodes in which the kids were supposed to be awful, they were far better than the highest-jury-scoring school choirs I’ve ever heard. Same for when a group of the male teachers decided to form their own a cappella group—they were effortlessly perfect, instantly.
Which, you know, is fine in the world of screen musicals, in which an invisible orchestra swells up and an entire town sings about the Atchison, Topeka, and the Santa Fe before going back about its business. Glee is supposed to be about a scrappy substandard vocal group straining to be better than the sum of its parts. But it’s too good. Why should the kids work any harder? Their songs are already best-sellers every Thursday morning on iTunes.
I’m also not fond of the show’s wishy-washiness over how to handle its musical numbers, either. For a while there it seemed as if it would stick to having the kids singing only in rehearsals or performances, but then it would veer off unexpectedly into singing revenge fantasies in individual characters’ heads, or a let’s-pretend rehearsal session in which the idiot director would announce at the end of an impeccably-sung sight reading, “That’s the way it will sound some day!” But then, for almost every awkwardness, there’ll be nice moments. The episode with Kristen Chenoweth, for example, featured a nice number in which the guest star and the girl lead sang Cabaret’s “Maybe This Time” to great effect.
2. Glee doesn’t live up to its title. There’s no joy in it. There’s no euphoria. The characters are either smart and cynical and throughly unlikeable (are we really supposed to forget that female lead Rachel, in the show’s first thirty seconds, ruined the former director’s career by falsely accusing him of molesting one of his students?), or gullible idiots. Everyone’s miserable and unpleasant. Everyone’s chewing on their own discontents and spewing bile.
That would be fine and dandy if the characters let the music transform them, or if singing made them feel happy—but it doesn’t. The musical numbers tend to be shouty, frantic, and rife with somersaulting acrobatics seemingly intended to distract from the vocal auto-tuning going on. After the big musical moments, they’re back to their glum lives. The limitation of being a weekly TV series is partly to blame. In a two-hour movie, it’s possible to have the happy ending that an open-ended series cannot. But jeez. I’ve never seen a show so dour.
I keep watching and hoping that the show will find its groove. Yet as with Paula Abdul and MC Scat Kat, it’s always two steps forward and one step back, with Glee.
Oh, and P.S., Glee writers. The thing you keep calling a mashup is really a medley, God damn it.
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