Wednesday, October 28, 2009

I EMPOWER MY CHEERIOS TO LIVE IN FEAR BY CREATING AN ENVIRONMENT OF IRRATIONAL, RANDOM TERROR: Sometimes I get oddly fixated on marginal details and bit players. Nate McMillan was my favorite basketball player of all time, and I hold the NFL's Patrick Jeffers and MLB's Chris Snelling in unjustifiably high regard. I was, for a period, obsessed with Cynthia Hopkins and Donald Saaf, two sidekicks in Dan Zanes's kid-music band. I'm a Cheese Wagstaff fan, a Mr. Ellsworth fan, a Naomi Esterbrook fan. There is a direct correlation between my appreciation of a TV show and the quality of its reaction shots. I don't care about everything at the edge of the frame, but I care irrationally much about a little of it.

So I'm writing to talk about what I think is the third-best* thing about Glee, a show that, as I've said, frustrates me endlessly. That would be Brittany, who, as played by Heather Elizabeth Morris, is the mostly-mute, near moodless (except in musical numbers), almost crosseyed cheerleader with the blonde bangs and topknot. Morris's role on the show is principally "featured dancer," and she throws herself into the production numbers with hair-whipping, leg-snapping abandon, commanding notice even though she often appears only as a yellow blur behind the steppier (to borrow an SYTYCD term) leads. That's a nice contrast to the gum-snapping, affectless Brittany in non-musical scenes. I have no idea whether that juxtaposition is intentional or just another continuity error in a show that makes no effort at continuity, but I choose to interpret it as signaling a rich inner life coaxed out only by suitably jubilant music (a thought that nicely dovetails with Morris's YouTube channel, which alternates between choreographed clip-reel fare, goofy digicam lip-synchs, and general dancer tomfoolery; please note that as stalkery as it may seem that I know of that channel, I found it only via IMDB while researching this post). Since, for me, Glee works dramatically only when it is centered around the joy -- not the craft or metaphorical significance -- of music, I'd much rather catch a glimpse of Morris and Chris Colfer cracking up in the background as an overexuberant Morris stumbles than a dozen production numbers where Lea Michele leans forward, hands clasped, enunciating depressingly about her unrequited love.

*The best, of course, is Jane Lynch. The second-best is J. Bowman's studious chronology of the happenings at William McKinley.

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