The Top 4 Reasons Why I Love and Hate Glee

After a painfully long two-month hiatus, Glee is finally returning to FOX next week with TWO episodes: one airing right after the Superbowl, and one during its regularly scheduled time on Tuesday.  Prepare for a Glee invasion on this blog (complete with Glee-related puns) because the thoughts I have about this show could probably fill a book.

The 2009-2010 TV season was good to me, as it introduced me to three new shows – The Vampire Diaries, Community, and Glee – to fall in love with.  But if shows were high school students, The Vampire Diaries and Community would be the naturally gifted and hard-working kids who aced every test, and Glee would be the kid with a ton of raw talent who never did any homework.  The show manages to fill me with delight and thoroughly irritate me in equal measure just about every episode.

Why?  Well, I’m sure I’ll have plenty of time and material to elaborate when the show returns for the second half of Season Two, but in brief, here are the Top 4 Reasons Why I Love and Hate Glee.

1. The Proliferation of Guest Stars

Glee has become the go-to show for any celebrity who wants a little more publicity.  I have nothing against guest stars in principle – Barry Bostwick and Meat Loaf showing up briefly during the Rocky Horror episode was a nice touch – but the writers have an annoying tendency to write entire episodes around these guest stars while their regular characters and more interesting guest stars get the shaft.  Gwyneth Paltrow should not have three songs when Carol Burnett only had one, Cheyenne Jackson has yet to do anything but humorously flounce by carrying a Hello Kitty backpack, and I still have no idea what motivates Tina as a character or why they never let Jenna Ushkowitz sing.

2. The Musical Numbers

I signed up for this show for two reasons: the dark humor and the sparkly musical numbers.  The musical numbers have become considerably less sparkly and they’re doing far too many Top 40 hits this year.  I don’t care if they sell the best on iTunes; I want more Queen and Broadway and less whoever does that “Billionaire” song.  Some of my favorite duets have come from this season, and if I had my way, Mercedes/Santana and Kurt/Rachel would be singing together every single episode.  I also love the addition of Blaine and the Warblers.  But Matthew Morrison has barely had any singing to do this season, which is criminal, because he’s the best one in the cast.

3. The Female Characters

This show has such a strange relationship with its female characters.  This season, the romances are told almost entirely from the points of view of the boys.  They’re all annoyed that they’re not getting laid, and the girls…well, we have no idea how they feel about sex, or their relationships with these boys, because Sam/Quinn, Artie/Brittany, Artie/Tina, Finn/Rachel, Will/Emma are told from the perspectives of Sam, Artie, Finn, and Will.  I’m not sure why I should give a fairy’s fart about Sam’s opinion since he’s an interloper who just got here and hasn’t earned this much screen time yet.  I don’t even know where to begin with the way they’re writing Rachel, or writing other characters’ reactions to Rachel, this year.  She’s so bitchy and insensitive and selfish and horrible that she deserves everyone’s hatred (even though she reached out to Kurt when he was at his loneliest, but let’s forget that and have her humiliate herself in front of Finn again instead).

On the other hand, the writers also seem to have more fun writing for the women than they do for the men.  The men, for the most part, are dimly sweet, a little cocky, or dumber than a box of hair.  The women, when they’re not being put into convenient boxes labeled “sluts” or “prudes,” get to have more fun and cause more trouble.  These writers love snappy one-liners, and with the exception of Puck, the characters that get the lion’s share of these one-liners are women: Sue, Santana, Brittany, Terri, Terri’s poisonous sister Kendra (lord, I miss her), and now sarcastic New Directions newcomer Lauren Zizes.  Will and Finn never get to say things like, “Your hair looks like a briar patch. I keep expecting racist, animated Disney characters to pop up and start singing about living on the bayou.”  The writers don’t waste time on things like “characterization” and “internal logic” for their women, but they sure provide them with the best zingers!  And I say that only half-sarcastically.

4. Whoa-oh-oh-oh oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh, caught in a Bad Romance

Glee is a musical comedy, and as such, there have to be a few love triangles and brewing romances.  The writers have their characters go through the steps of Sitcom Love Stories 101: Boy Meets Girl.  Boy Has Instant Chemistry With Girl.  If Only Boy Weren’t Committed to That Bitchy Other Girl Who Is An Albatross Hanging Around His Put-Upon Neck!  Boy Finally Breaks Up With Other Girl, Only to See that First Girl is Now With Other Guy!  “This is the song that doesn’t end; it just goes on and on, my friend…”

They did this with Will/Emma/Terri and Finn/Rachel/Quinn in the first season.  Then Rachel hooked up with Puck, and then Jesse St. James.  Now Emma is with Dr. Carl.  The writers assure us, implicitly and directly, that we needn’t worry about obstacles like Puck, Jesse St. James, and Dr. Carl, because Will/Emma and Rachel/Finn are their endgame couples.  Unfortunately for that plan, Emma is a billion times more confident and self-assured with Dr. Carl than she ever was with Will, and Rachel had much more in common with both Puck and Jesse St. James than she ever did with Finn.  In order to make the endgame couples work, they’ll have to write Emma as a flaky ninny and/or turn Dr. Carl into a jerk out of nowhere, and we’ll get to watch twenty more episodes of Rachel telling Finn that she’s not good enough for him and him agreeing with her.  Be still, my heart.  Writers, get a clue: if you want us to root for your intended couples, you can’t make their temporary obstacles more interesting than the people they’re “supposed” to be with!

But – and this is a BIG But (hee hee) – the writers seem much more adept at writing same-sex romances, because now they have Kurt and Blaine serenading one another, making googly eyes at each other, bonding over shared interests and experiences, and being cuter than a pack of baby ducks wearing red ribbons around their necks and frolicking in a field full of puppies.

Darren Criss as Blaine is my teenage dream, but more importantly, Chris Colfer as Kurt is my favorite character on TV and I love him to itty bitty pieces, and I’m finally glad that another boy (an impossibly dreamy gorgeous boy) is so shamelessly flirting with him.  Even if the show falls apart on every other level, I will watch until the bitter end as long as these two are on it.

Thus ends my conflicted feelings about Glee. When I review the new episodes, I will obviously look through the feminist lens, but I will also critique it based on the musical numbers, the humor, the romances, and the development of the Kurt/Blaine relationship (because I love them so much they deserve their own category).  It could be a very long journey until May, but I’m interested to see how it goes.