When Glee aired its pilot episode last May, I fell "in like" with the show. The incessant promotion throughout the summer didn't bother me like it bothered others—I was enjoying my anticipation "buzz." I couldn't wait to see more of Jane Lynch, who plays Sue Sylvester the deliciously evil cheerleader coach: she was walking out the door with the show tucked underneath a sweatsuit-adorned arm in a wake of chewed-up scenery. Though the other characters all paled in comparison to Lynch's villainess, everyone seemed likable enough and I figured the writers would finagle some good story lines in between some fun production numbers.
Most of all, I was impressed with the musical elements. Glee approaches the musical in a grounded way: songs don't just break out, Fame-like, in the middle of otherwise banal, everyday circumstances; no dancing on cafeteria tables. Almost all the music happens during show choir rehearsals and performances. (One notable—and successful— exception is the hilarious episode with the football team learning Beyonce's "Single Ladies [Put A Ring On It].") Even with this limitation, show creator Ryan Murphy still manages to use music to advance storyline and character development. It was an oasis of restraint in a show that keeps forgetting to set up boundaries.
Ah, restraint. I sigh, thinking of what Glee could have been. Maybe not even restraint. Maybe just a sanity check.
My concerns cropped up during the second episode when young, quasi-nerdy ingenue Rache tries bulimia (unsuccessfully). She complains in her bathroom stall that she has no gag reflex. Standing in the bathroom is the meek and germophobic Emma Pillsbury, a teacher. Emma comments out loud (I'm paraphrasing here): "That'll be useful when you're older." As crassly cynical as that zinger is, I would have let it go if it had come from a fellow student. But the fact that this came from the mouth of the most tightly wound and straight-laced character on the show showed a complete lack of respecting the characters.
Another example: somewhat hunky Finn Hudson, the football-player-turned-performer, has a problem with premature ejaculation (or maybe just arousal, it's unclear), so when he gets into sexual situations, he falls back on the age-old trick of thinking about something non-sexual. But Finn doesn't pick run-of-the-mill subject matter—say, vegetables or baseball statistics or reciting the pledge of allegiance in one's head. Instead, he recalls the memory of the mailman he hit with a car while learning to drive. The image (and sound) of the body slamming into the car's windshield was played numerous times in early episodes ... I suppose as a point of humor. I simply found it unnerving and distracting.
The weird thing is that I'm a huge (but somewhat closeted) fan of Ryan Murphy's other show, nip/tuck, which, partly due to the subject matter and partly due to the fact that it's on basic cable channel FX rather than a traditional network, gets to be outrageous in ways that Glee will never be. The writers of nip/tuck seem to be in a perpetual goal of topping the last episode in prurience or cosmetic mutilation, reaching deeper and deeper into the dark recesses of their collective psyche for outrageous ways to humiliate, arouse, and sometimes kill its characters. (Jessalyn Gilsig, who plays Terri Schuester on Glee, played a sexually addicted character on nip/tuck with one of the most memorable deaths I've ever seen.)
But nip/tuck doesn't try to pass itself off as any kind of reality. Glee sometimes wants to be nip/tuck in its soap-opera-rageousness at times ... but then at other times it has to be a more tame, traditional 2oth-century television teen drama. This split-personality kills the show for me. It's not that it ever truly jumps the shark, but it hops over a heckuva lot of barracudas. Moments of greatness are slammed (not unlike that mailman) by insanely lame, hare-brained parallel plots. An episode where the flamboyant Kurt Hummel comes out to his father (whose surprisingdisplay of tolerance is portrayed with poetic nuance by Mike O'Malley) is a series high point; unfortunately, it shares screen time with the completely ludicrous "I'm not pregnant but I'll take that baby off your hands, little cheerleader" story of Terri and her hearthrob-worthy-but-apparently-otherwise-doltish husband Will. (I mean, really, are we to believe that Will is the "perfect husband," metrosexual in all the right ways, doting and devoted to his shrewish and materialistic wife ... yet he can't be bothered to learn anything about pregnancy?)
And I'm sorry if anyone takes this as insensitive, but will they ever find a way to gracefully work Artie Abrams' wheelchair into the choreography of any song?
And when will they stop trying to create deep, tortured significance out of incessant, aggravating throwing-the-slushee-in-the-face bits? The green slime-dumping of You Can't Do That on Television was more clever in comparison.
And ...
Ugh. I'm irritating myself, so I can only imagine how you're feeling. If you got this far.
Anyway.
To be honest, Laura and I haven't cancelled the season pass for Glee. we're still TiVoing it, fast-forwarding through to watch the musical numbers. (I just realized that it's actually the opposite way I watch nip/tuck, where I fast-forward through the plastic surgery scenes!) It gets us through the hour-long episode in a nifty, efficient ten minutes. But even watching the songs from last week's episode ("Wheels"), I felt disappointed: the duet of "Defying Gravity" never really took off (and I can't decide if Chris Colfer's near-castrato performance was awe-inspiring or creepy). The all-wheelchair "Proud Mary" was just clunky and forced. (Hey, how did they afford all those wheelchairs on a $60-a-year budge the principal put them on in the pilot? Oh alright, I'll suspend disbelief and let that one go....)
But here's hoping that we get some more drop-dead show-stoppers like "Don't Stop Believing" and "Somebody To Love." This show needs something to tame it, because Jane Lynch can't do it all alone.
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