It’s hard to know quite where I stand on the end of Glee, Fox’s once monolithic singing-teens fun-time show. That’s something of a lie: Glee was never a ‘fun-time show’, but a victim of its own extended commercial. It was one of the bleakest shows ever to involve sequins, revolving around a failing teacher’s attempts to reclaim his youth by returning to the scene of his peak – High School Glee Club. Failure and reclamation is a mine visited by memoirists and high-art dramas time and time again; Glee’s initial thesis was, unfortunately, at odds with what everyone wanted it to be.
Make no mistake – this ‘everyone’ includes the show’s primary creative team, Brad Falchuck, Ian Brennan and Ryan Murphy. The initial promises fell to the wayside very quickly – including ‘no fantasy sequences’, an early interview promise that was broken by the time the 11th episode rolled around (and repeatedly, almost with malice, afterwards). The main casualty of a rift over the show’s focus was the thorny issue of what Glee aimed to be – the once-per-season ‘issues’ episodes[1] revealed a particular belief in the ‘power’ of Glee, even there was a debate over whether a musical comedy about singing teens was the right venue for those discussions. This is not to say that Glee became an ‘issues’ show only once per season – part of the counter argument for the ‘afterschool special’ criticism is that Glee’s through-plots are almost consistently teen issue-based; Quinn is pregnant, Kurt is being bullied, Rachel and Finn are getting married, these couples can’t forget their ‘first loves’, New York isn’t the dream that they wanted, Being an Adult is Hard – the sheer quantity of ‘issues’ on the show reveals an ambition towards teen-y drama, rather than the accused occasional devolution into preachy moralising that would spawn a few thinkpieces per season.
The thought of defending Glee seems odd to me – not because I don’t think it should have critics, or that its very vocal ones don’t have a point, but because I absolutely never saw it from the same perspective that a lot of people did. The initial point of contention on this point was ‘The Rachel Berry Show’ (or ‘That’s So Rachel’, in one of the show’s many somewhat unearned meta-moments). Once Glee’s initial fascination with Will Schuester faded away, it was left somewhat unmoored. This was for the best – the show’s peak bounced around the Rachel / Finn / Kurt / Will / Quinn / Artie / Tina / Mercedes ensemble to relative success. What seemed unanticipated was the sheer success of the show moving forward – more money meant being able to commit to its supporting cast, ascending Santana, Brittany, Puck, Mike et al from silent back-up dancers and awkward plot devices to full-blown members of the cast, a move never slowing from the introduction of Blaine and the Warblers all the way through to the show’s second and third generations of glee club members.
At this point, Glee had to double down, and the result was The Rachel Berry Show, in which her and her chosen friends were the focus of the show (if Lea Michele’s Rachel was the lead, then Chris Colfer’s Kurt was the second in command. Romances and paramours filled out the rest of the cast, Mercedes or Santana swung into the fray to round them out, and by the time New York came around the show realised Artie and Sam would be forced into the role of its Sixth Ranger). The issue that a lot of people no doubt felt with later Glee compared to its early seasons definitely lies in The Rachel Berry show, so far from the story of a teacher reliving his glory years surrounded by plucky teens so as to seem almost alien. The DNA of those early episodes is definitely very different. I don’t have a judgement to place on this. I’ve seen every episode, and I just don’t know if avoiding this would have been substantially different.
Part of why I think I realised where the show was heading early on – towards its Rachel focus – was that I didn’t care much about 90% of the show to begin with. I was a sucker for Kurt, a well-adjusted gay teen in a wasteland of absent representation. ‘Well-adjusted’ is a loaded phrase – he was nearly perfect to a fault, barrelling from bullying to heartbreak to hate crime as though it was his place to suffer. It probably was, in hindsight, as the soapier teen drama elements of Kurt’s narrative were definitely new when Glee started. Compare it to now – post-Glee, we’ve had Shondaland and Happy Endings, we’ve had Looking and (ugh) Smash, we’ve had Orphan Black and The Fosters and Faking It; time moves a lot faster pre-Glee on wikipedia’s list of LGBTQAI+ characters on television, is it unfair to suggest this plucky show about singing teens had an impact? Probably, to be honest. There’s a lot to the argument that Glee was an outlier representative of a changing attitude over time, rather than some great catalyst. It’s a nice narrative, though; saying Glee changed America, if not the world, reads very well for its creators and its parent network, Fox.
I still think back to that show with that doughy faced queer kid who was supported and loved, though. It felt so rare. I was a year or so out of high school and dealing with my own shit. The idealised version of where I’d just been meant a lot – it seemed monumental to see a queer kid thriving in high school. When his story turned to bullying, that hit home too. It was a different show at that point – Glee thrived on being different shows week-to-week – but it still had me. Six years later, Kurt and Blaine seem trite and a little formulaic. So do Santana and Brittany. I’m so glad we’re at the point we can say that.
This is the ultimate take away for me when it comes to Glee. It was a good show, at first. Things happened. It’s not mine to try to understand how it ended up where it did. All I know is how I felt. Glee, to quote it, is about opening yourself up to joy. First came the joy that it signalled a sea-change in queerness on TV. Now, there’s the joy of knowing that it never quite went far enough, and that in the time it was on air things have changed enough that it seems pedestrian. Glee tried to be monumental. It became the predictable and ordinary Rachel Berry Show. It wasn’t always great to watch, but to see something be outstripped by the march of time was definitely worth it.
Six Episodes To Definitely Watch:
- Season One: ‘Journey to Regionals’.
- Season Two: ‘Silly Love Songs’.
- Season Three: ‘Heart’.
- Season Four: ‘Dynamic Duets’.
- Season Five: ‘The Quarterback’.
- Season Six: ‘Homecoming’.
Six Episodes To Definitely Avoid:
- Season One: ‘Funk’.
- Season Two: ‘A Night of Neglect’.
- Season Three: ‘I Kissed A Girl’.
- Season Four: ‘Shooting Star’.
- Season Five: ‘Old Dog, New Tricks’.
- Season Six: ‘The Hurt Locker, Part One’.
Six Early Glee Songs You Probably Love:
- Season One:
- Season One:
- Season Two:
- Season Two:
- Season Three: ‘Rumor Has It / Someone Like You’.
- Season Three:
Six Great Late Glee Songs You Probably Missed:
- Season Four:
- Season Four:
- Season Five: ‘Nasty / Rhythm Nation’.
- Season Five: ‘Doo Wop (That Thing)’.
- Season Six:
- Season Six:
[1] Season One: ‘Laryngitis’, Season Two: ‘Born This Way’, Season Three: ‘Choke’, Season Four: ‘Shooting Star’, Season Five: ‘Bash’, Season Six: ‘Transitioning’.
One Last Parting Shot:
