Thursday, September 17, 2009

GLUM: Yes, as Matt says below, last night's episode of Glee was the worst of the show's three episodes. I would go so far as to say it was a complete manic mess, hyperactively mixing nice cameos and disturbing humor with choppy exposition and extraneous performance videos. But unlike Matt, I think last night's episode was a symptom of the more systemic problems the show has -- problems that are not solved just by adding more Lea Michele.

This is not a show whose premise is universal, like an office comedy or a family drama. Instead, it assumes the difficult task of cobbling together a mass audience comprised of discrete interest groups: musical theater fans; a cappella fans (or, rather, the presumably somewhat larger group of people who are open to becoming a cappella fans); fans of sarcastic teen comedy. Those three groups are not completely incompatable, and there may be wide areas of overlap, so that's not entirely the problem.

The show, though, also decided to add a tone of unironic affirmation -- "be true to yourself!"; "have the guts to dream!"; "hang in there!!!" -- that may have been one element too many to maintain a workable balance. The show just seems like an endless string of inconsistencies. Pitch-perfect acid like Jane Lynch's "it's nice how you use your mental illness to help them" or Ken Tanaka's "I live at the YMCA and own only one pair of long pants" can't live comfortably with sledgehammery themes ("guts," which characters said so many times you'd think the show was anticipating a drinking game) or tacked-on platitudes ("if you believe in yourself, you don't have to bring others down," which, incidentally, was incomprehensible in context). Structural premises like "the cool kids hate Glee Club" and "the adult world mimics the teen world" are incompatible with the most anti-Glee football player joining an adult a cappella band or with the wild (and wildly unbelievable) popularity of the Acafellas among adults. It makes no sense to do a morality tale about a group of misfits succeeding because (not in spite) of their nonconformity, then dropping in a musical number featuring 20 or so identical backlit and faceless dancers gyrating suggestively in bikinis and short skirts just because that's how everybody does it in R&B videos. Those sexually aggressive (or is it objectified? You decide) dancers were high school cheerleaders, by the way -- something that Glee finds not worthy of commentary, even while it makes (funny) jokes out of both the predatory former Glee Club director and the sex obsession of the football player. And that's to say nothing of the incompatible acting styles in the show, from the default naturalism of most of the actors to Lea Michele's obvious musical-theater delivery to Quinn's impenetrable (har, har) Peggy-Olson-Meets-Mona-Lisa rictus.

My guess is that if you like or have liked this show, it is because you are in one or more of the interest groups it is courting. The more of those interest groups that the show tries to serve, though, the greater the risk that the balance will tip away from what any one group likes and toward stuff that it doesn't like. That, I think, was the problem of last night's episode: too much comic pedophilia for the Up With People crowd; too much old white guys singing Wonderbread versions of R&B songs for the ironic-appreciation-of-Cruel-Intentions crowd; not enough Lea Michele for the folks who don't just think of Victor Garber as Spy Daddy; and too much Jessalyn Gilsig for everyone.

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