I know I’m pretty late to the game to be reviewing Glee. The show wrapped up its first season months ago, and season two doesn’t debut for weeks. But here it is anyway.
When you read a review on any piece of art, the general thing people want to know is what it’s about, is it any good, and why it’s good. I feel those parameters are somewhat restrictive though. I mean I think Party in the USA is a great song, but not because it contains good song writing or anything remotely qualitative; I just think it’s a lot of fun and really catchy. Similarly, I love the movie Road House, but I don’t pretend it’s anything close to Shakespearean. But with television, I almost always demand that a series go above and beyond. A TV show can’t just be “fun.” It has to be about something. I think this is due to the fact that we were spoiled so well in the last decade. After watching shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and The Office (UK), it’s almost impossible for me to tolerate anything even a layer beneath. Those series were basically art, they challenged the audience to think, and more importantly pay attention, something most network series like Law & Order never do. So now I won’t watch anything as banal as Entourage anymore because it’s too simplistic, too safe to be taken seriously, and completely predictable. A bad song only wastes three minutes of my life; a bad movie two hours, three at the most. But a terrible show, that takes up way too much of my time, and I don’t have the patience to get sucked into something ridiculous (like effing L Word!)
Now Glee comes along and throws my whole system out of whack.
I wanted to hate this show. I felt like a musical set in the medium of television couldn’t possibly work. I can believe a bunch of people singing on stage or in a movie for two hours or less, but stretched over 22-episodes and I’m not convinced. The momentum is gone after a while. But believe it or not, after three episodes into the first season of Glee, I’m actually enjoying the music and looking forward to hearing more of it.
The problem with Glee isn’t that it’s a musical, surprisingly. It’s that the formula is all too familiar and redundant.
The story is simple enough: a high school teacher sets out to restore his school’s glee club to its former glory. He enlists the school’s nerds, freaks and other social rejects to join up. The star of this club is Rachel (Lea Michele), an overachiever with a beautiful set of pipes. Of course not everyone is thrilled with having a glee club in their school, least of all Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch), the head coach of the cheerleader squad (the Cheerios). The glee club also faces the wrath of the more popular students, including the Cheerios and their jock brethren. We see the familiar caste system at play here but with more of a sense of humour and less melodrama than other high school shows.
I have to go back to what I said earlier about not tolerating anything beneath The Sopranos or The Wire. Because those series were so good at blowing up our notions about the mafia, drug dealers and the police department among other aspects of the crime drama, I looked at Glee with the same critical lens. As I predicted, there are no new revelations about high school politics, nothing subversive or eye-opening about its storylines, no rocking of the boat at all. The very familiar rivalries and romances emerge – the jock and the nerd girl, the popular kids vs. the outcasts, the teacher with the heart of gold vs. the school administration. After three episodes in, already I’m feeling déjà vu. What saves it is the tongue-in-cheek direction, which comes out quite nicely in the first episode when we find out the school’s guidance counselor has OCD.
And yes the music is great. Not every number works (like that horrible cover of Golddiger. Kanye never sounded so gay), but the ones that do are great fun. The cast get the ball rolling well with Don’t Stop Believin'. I think they picked this song as a way of saying it’s ok to like us, we’re just like Journey – cheesy, but at least we don’t take ourselves too seriously.
I thought casting the achingly beautiful Lea Michele as the head nerd-girl was a bit of a throwback to She’s All That, but she’s so good in the part that you barely think about it. Think Tracy Flick from Election but with a beautiful singing voice. And Jane Lynch is of course wonderful as Sue Sylvester. Her 40-Year-Old Virgin and Role Models persona manages to transfer well on the small screen despite the network constraints on foul language. I wouldn’t be surprised if the producers let her do a little improving (it would be insane not too).
Where Glee fails is where most network series fail. There are too many familiarities for it to be considered a fresh take on high school. Voiceovers are used to provide characters with exposition – been there done that. I also don’t understand why a series about high school outcasts chooses to spend so much time on its “beautiful” characters. Glee’s minority characters get the usual shaft as a result like most minority characters on TV, and given no development and very little screen time. They’re simply filler, or worse, a pathetic attempt at showing off diversity. What a waste.
Still, I enjoyed Glee more than I hated it. It’s flawed, and will probably start to feel stale after the first thirteen episodes (from the TV ads, it looks like they’re already relying on the cheap celebrity cameo appearance half-way into their first season; not a good sign). But if it sinks, we can probably still look forward to a handful of solo albums and movie deals for its talented cast.
