Glee on FOX
Fox’s Glee, debuted with a “special preview” strategy early on, but the season only started this fall. Glee is neither as good as you’ve heard nor as bad as you might have feared. The pilot, however, is the best network pilot that has come out in a long time.
With the success of High School Musical and Bollywood coming to the forefront, why not add song and dance to entertain the masses. Although, the shows genre is quite hard to pin down at first watch. Is it a Musical or a Dramedy. Its a cross between the two. The characters have voiceovers and flashbacks instead of songs where they talk about their feelings.
The story of Glee not only revolves around the kids in the show choir, but covers their friends, their teachers, their teachers’ friends, and significant others. The tone veers wildly from campy to satirical to sincerity, and the whole thing is emassed with style. The pilot’s first ten minutes almost a chore to swallow, as it tries to cram every possible plot point and character into the narrative in a way that feels cluttered. It gives us information that we already know about high school and that has been given to us time and time again.
There’s essentially no good way to do an original teen drama anymore, so every new teen drama just tosses a few new elements into the mix and hopes for the best. Glee’s betting on large-scale musical numbers that start as laughs and turn into plot commentary. This is where the show begins to unveil how both its world and its characters are deeper than they first appear.
There’s no way around the impact that the renditions of “Rehab” and “Don’t Stop Believing” have on the show: they are what sets the show apart, and they are being executed at a high level.
Glee uses the show choir to show the viewers the ways we limit our own dreams and the ways they can limit us. There’s a wildly entertaining a big song-and-dance climax.
Will, a teacher obsessed with restoring the show choir to recapture an ounce of his faded glory, has moments when he pretty much seems like a complete nutball, hellbent on remembering who he was and forgetting who he’s become. Matthew Morrison manages to play all of these shades ably. He even gets to sing, and though it feels completely shoehorned in, Morrison’s voice is so nice that you’ll be willing to give that element a pass.
The cast is superb, Lea Michele and Cory Monteith are both agreeable and a little desperate for an outlet as the show choir’s central two singers. Jayma Mays finds intriguing hints of sorrow in a character that could have been completely irritating. Jane Lynch is hilarious, though she only pops up here and there, like a secret comedic weapon.
The show’s biggest misstep comes from how it treats Will’s wife, Terri, played by Jessalyn Gilsig. Gilsig’s a more than capable actress, but she seems to portray the stereotype of the wife who holds the main character back. She is trite in the sense she is obsessed with shopping, crafts, and cleanliness. Before you watch the previews for the first episode, it is pretty obvious that she will fake a pregnancy.
Ryan Murphy is being used to promote the show. To his discredit, Popular chose not to create a world but, , to just copy other worlds and make fun of them. Nip/Tuck started as one of the best new shows on television, and went down a slippery slope it never recovered from. Let’s hope the Glee does not experience the same fate. There are plot points introduced late in the show that seem destined to be mishandled down the line, simply because of Murphy’s previous track record.
However, Glee is the kind of show that builds to a climax so improbable that it washes away your objections to it almost as soon as you can formulate them. It is decidedly not going to be for everyone, and I suspect it will always have its detractors opposed to something universally loved like Freaks and Geeks. Glee is a show that knows the anticipation of the curtain going up, the excitement of the spotlight flickering on.
