We got a Tardy Pass, and we promise to make up the time...

Being that this is the first Glee review for Shadowlocked, some introduction may be in order.

Glee is a musical dramedy produced by and broadcast on the Fox Network. It revolves around an ensemble of high school students, the titular glee club called “New Directions” (in case you don’t get the joke, I’ll spell it out for you - the group’s name sounds like “Nude Erections”), and the educators nominally in charge of its training and/or fate. Running the club is Spanish teacher Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), who was a member of the school’s show choir (it means “glee club”) back in the early nineties. He is married to Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig), whose faked pregnancy both ruined their already tenuous marriage and was a sore spot of unrelenting unbelievability in a show by then brimming with unrealistic twists. Good thing that plot thread came to a halt just prior to the show’s agonizingly long mid-season hiatus.

Filling out the rest of the adult cast are Will’s love interest, the school’s mysophobic (she has a pathological fear of dirt) guidance counselor, Emma Pillsbury (Jayma Mays); the vicious and spiteful cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch), Will’s self-appointed nemesis; and put-upon Principal Figgins (Iqbal Theba), who is often caught up in Sue and Will’s squabbles.

The club’s key vocalist is Rachel Berry (Lea Michele); an irritating, perpetually chipper sophomore whose sole purpose in life is to be noticed and praised to the only logical conclusion she can imagine: fame. She crushes on clueless Finn Hudson (Corey Monteith), the quarterback, male lead tenor and boyfriend of the bitchy head cheerleader, Quinn Fabray (Dianna Agron). She is pregnant via Puck (Mark Salling), Finn’s best friend and fellow footballer, a fact which came to light at the end of the first segment of the season.

Outside of that romantic rhombus, which received the lion’s share of too many episodes’ runtime, come the hyphenated tokens: wheelchair-bound Artie Abrams (Kevin McHale), Asian perky-goth Tina Cohen-Chang (Jenna Ushkowitz), big-voiced black girl Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley), and very-out babygay Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer). These characters are each interesting in their own right but remain criminally underused, managing about one solo each in the whole of the first thirteen episodes despite appearing in every episode.

Rounding out the club are the obviously tertiary rung of characters: Brittany and Santana (Heather Morris and Naya Rivera), Sue’s spies from the cheerleading squad; and Matt and Mike (Dijon Talton and Harry Shum, Jr), two more football players known to most viewers as “Shaft” and “Other Asian,” such is their contribution to the plot. Hell, I don’t think either of them had a single spoken line in thirteen episodes.

"This is a show about a collection of deeply needy and miserable people trying as hard as they can to break free from their shitty provincial life in Suburban Hell, Ohio"

As I mentioned earlier, Glee is a musical - specifically, a jukebox musical (i.e. there is no original music written for the show; all the numbers, whether part of a performance or in the characters’ minds, are well-known pop, rock, rap or Broadway songs). That being said, its status as a musical does not necessarily establish any hard and fast rules about its tone - though its name and nature conjure thoughts of happiness, or at least a joyous pitch, this is a show about a collection of deeply needy and miserable people trying as hard as they can to break free from their shitty provincial life in Suburban Hell, Ohio. It’s not quite Neon Genesis Evangelion, but each character has their own unique issue or neurosis, some more pronounced than the others.

I realize that I’ve kind of pissed all over the program and its characters, but let’s be clear - I really do like this show. For the first five episodes, I thought it was kind of tedious and a little too clever for its own good; like it was designed to be Freaks and Geeks with jazz hands. The camp elements were tired to me, growing up as I did on many a pillar of campiness: Clue (or Cluedo, for our British readers), Thriller, Queen music videos and so on.

Nothing about it really felt fresh or interesting, other than finally seeing something that in some way resembled my own high school experience; basically, I was like the Star Trek Mirror Universe version of Rachel: while we shared being Jewish and effortlessly getting leads, I was male where she is not, dour where she is bright, floating through life where she is dedicated and in drama club where she is in show choir.

I was giving the show five episodes to hook me, and I kind of bought into the characters’ twisted motivations and the show’s slanted reality. It’s partially a “normal” musical, where the songs are part of an in-universe performance and partially imaginary, where the musical scenes are taking place in the characters’ minds; but also, the whole thing exists on some odd plane of heightened emotion and tweaked social mores, and it just wasn’t gelling. Granted, the pilot’s last scene where the group performs Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin” was excellent, but nothing else worked for me.

"At the very end of the last episode I was going to watch before chalking it up to a loss of five hours, they actually had a moment of inspired awesomeness where a song transcended the telenovela-level subplots and logical inconsistencies"

Then, at the very end of the last episode I was going to watch before chalking it up to a loss of five hours, they actually had a moment of inspired awesomeness where a song transcended the telenovela-level subplots and logical inconsistencies to do more than just make sense thematically, it elevated the entire effort to a state of bliss. In having them sing “Somebody to Love,” the writers managed to tie in the characters’ senses of longing for whatever (or whomever) they were pining for into three minutes of sheer joy.

Or maybe I just really love Queen. “Somebody to Love” is one of my favorite songs.

Regardless, suddenly the campiness was embraced, the annoying self-awareness of its own cleverness fell away and I was sold. Still, the program’s problems are myriad and mostly related to the screentime allotted to the various caste-like tiers of characters. We’ll get to all that, though. And now - Glee!

Glee s01e14 - “Hell-O”

“Hello, I Love You” - The Doors
“Gives You Hell” - The All-American Rejects
“Hello” - Lionel Richie
“Hello Again” - Neil Diamond
“Highway to Hell” - AC/DC
“Hello, Goodbye” - The Beatles

Ok, so they’ve finally acknowledged that the show is set in Ohio and that it gets horribly cold there in the winter, so now it’s basketball season and Finn, Puck, Mike and Matt are playing for the McKinley High Titans. This allows the added convenience of not having to come up with costumes or hair for Brittany or Santana, as they wear their cheerleading uniforms to school five days a week, even after school, even if there was no game that day. I don’t know anyone who ever went to any high school, anywhere, that had its cheerleaders in uniform every day. Outside of in-context performances with the club, I don’t think we’ve ever seen them in other clothes or with hairstyles other than high, tightly-pulled ponytails.

"I don’t know anyone who ever went to any high school, anywhere, that had its cheerleaders in uniform every day."

Picking up what I guess is a month after the last episode (hell, it could be the very next day - the time span is actually very unclear as to how long has passed), Will and Emma are trying to figure out what being together would entail, Finn and Rachel are dating and Quinn has begun seeing Puck, now that their secret is out. However, Rachel is still grating and Finn still has eyes for Quinn, despite her new dating arrangement. Puck remains an assclown (“You need to stop supersizing cause... I don’t dig on fat chicks” he says to Quinn, whose response of “I’m pregnant!” is met with “And that’s my fault?”), prompting Quinn many eye-rolls and sighs.

Following her suspension for contriving to sabotage New Directions’ chances to win their sectional competition, thus allowing the school funds earmarked for glee to revert back to the Cheerios, Sue has blackmailed Figgins into reinstating her. She immediately sets to monkeywrenching New Directions with her cohorts Brittany and Santana, suggesting that if either of them want to back in her good graces following not only their failure to stop, but also their complicity in the group’s success at sectionals, they should contrive to steal Finn from Rachel, breaking her heart and forcing her out of the club.

Having established that they have sex (with each other) in the previous episode, Brittany and Santana set to their task, linking pinky fingers and coquettishly asking Finn if he’d like to go on a date - with both of them. Already unsure if he really wants to be with Rachel, he dumps her, prompting an outburst of painful truth about Finn’s shortcomings as a person, which Rachel is the only person who cares about him in spite of. Rachel follows this up with a performance of “Gives You Hell,” facilitating an opportunity for Mike and Matt to dance. They’re quite good at the pop-and-lock; now if only they could have some dialogue.

At the music store, picking through sheet music for a song with “hello” in the title to fulfill Will’s assignment for the week, Rachel runs into Jesse St. James (Jonathan Groff) - the male lead for Vocal Adrenaline, New Directions’ rival and toughest opponent at their upcoming regional competition. He is even more pretentious and self-absorbed than Rachel, who is immediately smitten with someone actually at or beyond her level.

Finn’s date with Brittany and Santana (still in uniform) goes oddly while they literally carry on as though he isn’t there and Will’s romantic night with Emma grinds to a halt when she reveals she hasn’t had any kind of intimate contact with anyone, ever. The next day Finn attempts to get back together with Rachel only to be shut down. Finn tells everyone in glee club about Rachel’s new boyfriend, for fear that he’s another plant to ruin their chances at competition.

Will goes to watch Vocal Adrenaline rehearse a loud, pyrotechnic rendition of “Highway to Hell” and talks to their coach, Shelby Corcoran (Idina Menzel), about the possibility that they’re trying to interfere with New Directions. She simultaneously flirts with and insults him, leading to a smash cut of them tangled up on Will’s couch before he stops it due to his feelings for Emma and his unfinished (unstarted?) divorce from Terri.

The second rung group members (Tina, Artie, Mercedes and Kurt) then confront Rachel about her new beau. It seems that the characters really are stratified: the top tier gets most of the plot focus; the next one down gets occasional scenes (and their own episode, “Wheels”), almost always with each other; and the last batch are barely there, aside from Brittany and Santana taking Quinn’s vacated character slot as semi-villains following her sympathetic development.

Terri shows up for one scene to stir up shit between Will and Emma, which works, prompting Emma to stop seeing Will until he can get some distance between himself and his sort-of ex-wife. Rachel decides to continue seeing Jesse without the others knowing in a scene that confirms his duplicity and, in turn, Shelby’s: they are out to get New Directions. The episode wraps up with Finn declaring that he isn’t going to give up on Rachel and the group rehearsing “Hello, Goodbye” while Rachel awkwardly sings and dances with Finn before running away at the song’s conclusion.

"When a show is supposed to be about a group of characters, I want more than two or three subplots to advance per week"

Thus ends the long-awaited return of Glee, and what did we get? An episode revolving almost solely around Finn/Rachel and Will/Emma. You know, this show won a Golden Globe for Outstanding Ensemble, but it’s usually just about those characters and tonight’s episode was no different, which is kind of disappointing. I don’t know if it’s due to the fact that I’m actually watching the show on a weekly basis instead of all at once, which is how I usually watch seasons of TV, or because there’s something really wrong here, but when a show is supposed to be about a group of characters, I want more than two or three subplots to advance per week.

I know not everything can be Deadwood, where around three dozen characters were fully developed and five or six plot threads could be moved in a single hour, but this episode was more like Heroes: a disappointing slog with very few people who aren’t as interesting as several others in the cast. In this episode, almost everyone was treated like Mike and Matt, which is a total shame, given how long we had to wait for this it.

It wasn’t nearly enough to make me doubt the overall entertainment value of the show, since a little bit of goodwill goes a loooooooooong way with me (I watched every episode of Heroes, after all). However, that doesn’t really excuse this episode’s lack of anything to make it truly special, which, after three months of downtime, it should have been. Here’s hoping next week’s ultra-hyped Madonna-centric episode can recapture some of the magic the series squirted out before.

Grade: C+

Random Observations

- Where is Quinn living? Her parents kicked her out of their opulent Republican semi-mansion, so she went to live with Finn and his very understanding mother. Well now that they’re broken up, is she still staying there? Did she shack up with Puck? I hate it when major-ish plot points get dumped on the wayside.

- The glee club meetings always take place during school hours. I know this because sometimes there are scenes which take place during the same school day, after the meetings. How can there be meetings when those twelve kids (plus the four to eight members of their backing band) should be in class? On that subject, you almost never see them in class. Glee isn’t a class, it’s a club; it should have its meetings and rehearsals after school. Even if it is a class, why are there so many students roaming the halls visibly through the window in the choir room’s door?

- The guy playing Jesse starred with Lea Michele in “Spring Awakening” on Broadway.

Great Lines

Sue - (having dropped off coffee for Figgins) I would’ve gotten you one, Will, but uh... I don’t like you.
Finn - (about Rachel) Now that we’re sort of dating I have to work so much harder to pretend to be listening to her.
Will - What do you guys say when you answer the phone?
Mercedes - What up?
Artie - Who dis be?
Kurt - No, she’s dead, this is her son.
Jesse - I’ve got a full ride to a little school called the University of California - Los Angeles. Maybe you’ve heard of it; it’s in Los Angeles.
Santana - (to Finn on their three-way date) Let us give you an introduction into the way we work: you buy us dinner and we make out in front of you - it’s like the best deal ever.
Shelby - (about Jesse’s “show face”) You want to look so talented it’s literally hurting you.
Brittany - Sometimes I forget my middle name.

P.S.: There was a clip at the end of the episode for next week’s show which I was urged to include in this review under the impression that seeing it out of the context of its episode was fine since it appears to not be a part of that episode’s actual narrative, excised for promotional purposes. I resisted in an effort to remain spoiler-free, but eventually caved when finally convinced of its harmlessness.

It was an almost shot-for-shot recreation of the music video for “Vogue” featuring the cast of Glee and starring Sue Sylvester as Madonna. I thought Jane Lynch’s singing was a fair facsimile of Madonna’s and the use of a smattering of the cast as her back-up dancers was cute. However, what were the rest of the cast doing that they weren’t in the video? I could only pick out Mike, Brittany, Santana, Mercedes and Kurt, which strikes me as odd.

Still, it was a fun little clip and it was nice to hear Lynch sing (I think that’s the first time we’ve heard it). There could’ve been more little in-jokes included, which would’ve helped, but on a whole, it was an enjoyable Glee-related way to spend three minutes.