100 Favorite Shows: #83 — Glee
“What’s that saying? The show’s gotta go all over the place or something.”
[Disclaimer: Mark Salling, who played Puck on Glee, committed suicide after it was determined he would face up to seven years in prison for child pornography charges. The full timeline of these charges and of Salling’s eventual death can be read on People.]
[Disclaimer: Samantha Marie Ware, who played Jane on Glee, accused Lea Michele, who played Rachel, of perpetuating “traumatic microaggressions” that were racially motivated while they worked together on Glee. Other co-stars, including Alex Newell, who played Unique, and Heather Morris, who played Brittany, corroborated Ware’s accusations. An exclusive interview Ware gave to Variety delves into more detail.]
Most ideas for television series never make it past the pitch stage. Even fewer get a pilot. Full series orders only occur in the rarest of instances. In 2009, however, Fox knew they had a mega-hit on their hands. Ian Brennan, Brad Falchuk, and Ryan Murphy created Glee, the story of a Glee Club at the fictional William McKinley High School. The Glee pilot aired on May 19, 2009 to generate buzz for a show that would not begin its first season until four months later. What followed was a cultural behemoth that captured critical buzz, awards hauls, and one of the medium’s most massive followings ever (Gleeks!). Over six seasons, Glee never sailed smoothly, but it always generated interest — for better and for worse.
It’s hard to even know what to say about Glee. It’s not like there’s that much mystery to it. Everything that went wrong with Glee was public knowledge and well-known in the zeitgeist and everything that went right was what made it such a phenomenon out of the gate. “Don’t Stop Believing” was everywhere, suddenly rejuvenated into the cultural consciousness, because Glee was appointment viewing during that first season and a half or so. The consequence of that popularity is that all of the show’s shortcomings and exterior controversies were also everywhere.
A hit so big that it opened the Emmys with Jimmy Fallon, Glee put a cappella into the mainstream and (in just a few short months) got everyone to be sick of a cappella renditions of popular songs or wacky, offbeat mashups of two different styles of music. It produced Mr. Schuester (Matthew Morrison), one of the cringiest characters to watch in the history of television, what with his Joseph Gordon-Levitt-esque lip curls and utter incompetence and martyrdom as a high school teacher. It vastly overestimated the audiences’ desire for camp when it started out with fun quirks, like the name “Bryan Ryan” (Neil Patrick Harris), obsessions with Patti LuPone, and dialogue like, “Why won’t you tell me your hopes and dreams?” before eventually morphing into the kind of camp that envisioned Jeb Bush as the president in 2020.
For all of these flaws, the surrounding meta-narrative of Glee has not been its status as one of the most 2009 things of all-time, but rather as a show that seems to be endlessly mired in tragedy. Obviously, there is the untimely death of Cory Monteith, who played the series’ male lead, Finn Hudson, in 2013. It’s hard to even revisit Glee without being reminded of the crushing loss of someone so talented and so burdened.
But there are also the recent allegations of racism on the set against Michele. And everything that happened with Salling, the biggest waste of all, as he was accused of sexual battery and sentenced to prison on child pornography charges that resulted in his suicide.
I don’t mean to equate Monteith with Michele with Salling. Not at all. I just mean to show that Glee seems to have carried on with a pall cast around it. I’d be tempted to call it a curse if I wasn’t aware that it was just a flawed group of human beings, with some being so evil in their actions.
Even now, following the death of Naya Rivera in July, I don’t want to call Glee a curse because that trivializes the real trauma experienced by many and reduces it to a television show they have in common. I don’t mean Glee is cursed in a joking sense. I legitimately just mean that it’s absolutely bizarre and tragic and horrifying how many terrible things have stemmed from this show — and in just ten years’ time no less. It’s disturbing.
It’s become Glee’s legacy, even though the show was anything but those things. Ryan Murphy’s series of camp aimed to be like the glee club it represented. Inclusive to all and a new direction for those who’d have never been cast on a high school show prior to it. For all of its deep, deep flaws, I couldn’t help but recognize the incredible ambition that Glee embodied when I revisited a few episodes for this project. It was aching, flawed ambition that was far too vast for the show (which was at its strongest in season one and grew progressively weaker as the show expanded its scope) to handle and it ultimately left the show in an unceremonious, muddled place. A far cry from the self-assured behemoth it was during the early days.
Despite it all, I couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed at the season four episode, “Swan Song.” By this point, the show had become undeniably sprawling. The glee club was not only massive; it was experiencing immense overturn on an episode-by-episode basis. Mr. Schue and Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch) were practically friends by this point, as reluctant as they would have been to admit it. Rachel and Kurt (Chris Colfer) were making their dreams happen for themselves in the big city at NYADA. It wasn’t the Glee I’d fallen in love with at all. I didn’t really feel anything for the new cast members and I wasn’t invested in the post-high school stories of Rachel, Kurt, and Finn. As I watched the episode, I almost felt prepared to drop it off the Top 100 entirely. But then it happened.
With the snow falling outside McKinley, Finn, inspired by Rachel’s victory lap/phone call earlier, makes a Hail Mary attempt to reunite the glee club, which had disbanded after Marley (Melissa Benoist) indirectly caused the group’s disqualification. When she’s the only one who shows up at night, Finn begins to sing “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House.
There’s a battle ahead
Many battles are lost
But you’ll never see the end of the road
While you’re traveling with me
The moment is so chills-inducing that I couldn’t bear it and I just started to cry. I don’t know if I was moved by the haunting nature of Monteith’s voice or by the original Crowded House song. Maybe I was just thinking of when I was a kid walking through a shopping mall and seeing a poster with a slushie on it and wondering what Glee actually was. Maybe I was just an adult, living on my own for the first time, rewatching old episodes with my friend who was going to be taken from my life at any moment. I was consumed — not by the enormity of the moment — by the enormity of the show. Ultimately, Glee will probably go down as a failure in the eyes of television historians. But for what it tried to do and for what feelings it could still conjure. I couldn’t help but feel exceedingly reverent for the attempt at all.
Glee was trying to tell a massive story and it tripped over its feet more than Goofy when he tried to learn how to play golf. It was hard to tell if the characters were worth the fervency of our rooting. It was hard to tell if any of the students should have been allowed to keep going to classes or if any of the teachers (read: Schue) should have been allowed to keep their jobs. (Seriously, this man sang “Thong Song” in the glee club room. I’d have been offended if I didn’t still have their “Gangnam Style” cover imprinted on my brain.) Ever so endearing and the embodiment of a heightened reality, though, Glee was about more than all of that.
Set in a dreamy concept of a public school with a slightly cynical bend (anchored by Sylvester and the stereotypical “popular” kids), Glee recognized the prevailing notion in many high school students that everything that happened in their teenage years was the most important thing in the world. (Glee could also be a way for students to express themselves to, as Rachel put it, “themselves.”) As such, it was an open invitation to parody, but this was always reductive to the larger influence of Glee. For all of the eye-rolling moments, there were many in the preppy stylings (it did cast Jayma Mays as Emma Pillsbury, after all) of the show that were game-changing for network television at the time. (Take Oxygen’s The Glee Project for example. It was a reality competition series that sought to cast a new member of the show. It’s how we got Newell, who’s still crushing it on Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, another obvious descent of the Glee fabric.)
Glee treated singing as a sport. The glee club was often in conflict with the athletics at McKinley (this Silicon Valley-esque push and pull between Schue and Sue did get a bit tiresome. How many times did the glee club need to prove itself exactly? It was their worst refrain), but it failed to recognize that music could be even more inspired by competition. Obviously, there were events like Sectionals and Regionals that pitted schools against one another, but there were also competitions within the characters for whom we rooted. In “Dream On,” when Bryan Ryan appears and auditions for a local production of Les Miserables, he has to compete for the role of Jean Valjean with Mr. Schue. To do so, they perform a duet of Aerosmith’s “Dream On.” Obviously, the goal is to out-sing the other person, but they still had to collaborate and harmonize with one another. If you tried to upend the other singer of a duet, you’d only be hurting yourself. Instead, Ryan and Schue had to go note-for-note with one another, illustrating the competitive nature of the music. There was as much of it in the singing as there was love and collaboration. Students found themselves in the love and passion of what they were doing. Doesn’t that sound like sports? It doesn’t have to be one or the other. They can coexist and collaborate, too. Both matter.
On Glee, mashups and flash mobs, among other such viral forms of performance, could be as innovative and groundbreaking as a two tight end offense in football or bullpenning in baseball. (The Office should be grateful that they got to the JK Wedding Entrance Dance first.) From this competition and collaboration came a wealth of stellar songs.
Kurt’s performance of “Being Alive” came from the need for individual depth he learned from the performers supporting him (can it happen without Darren Criss as Blaine crooning “Teenage Dream”?). Jessie St. James (Jonathan Groff in an iconic role) seemed to be named solely for the show to perform “Jessie’s Girl” in “Laryngitis.” Rachel, who sang from eight months old (compared to Finn’s big break stemming from the locker room, which, again, come on Mr. Schue), learned to use her star quality for good rather than pettiness. It results in a rousing, award-winning dual performance of “Being Good Isn’t Good Enough” and “O Holy Night,” neither of which would have been possible without her acceptance of Finn, the glee club, and her perfectly-cast mother (Idina Menzel), as core influences on her life.
They grew through the music (and yes, the music rights on this show must have been astronomical). Each song pushed the characters a little bit closer to not only finding out who they were meant to be, but who they were best suited to be in the company of others. That’s ultimately what I will forever admire about Glee, for all of its heavy problems and undeniable flaws.
I’ll also remember that moment when Finn sang Crowded House in the snow. The episode I mentioned earlier, “Dream On,” was not just a Les Mis-centric installment. It was also themed around dreams. “I Dreamed a Dream,” “Dream a Little Dream of Me,” and “Safety Dance,” which Artie (Kevin McHale — not that one) performed in a day dream, were all featured. (And also “Piano Man,” for some reason.) That’s what I thought of when Finn assured fans and glee club members, “Don’t dream it’s over.” Three years later, the show was unrecognizable, but the dreams were still there.
Finn didn’t know it, but Glee was over by then. There was no need to dream that it was over. We already knew that the Glee we once loved was gone. “Only shadows ahead/barely clearing the roof,” he belted out, a far version from the Finn we first met in “Pilot.” Glee was already over, but the feeling derived from it never had to go away. Only shadows were ahead for Glee. Don’t let them win.
