UGH-GLEE

Lord knows I have persevered with Glee. I have watched all eleven episodes of series one that have been shown on British satellite television, several of them twice. There will be two more episodes before the first series hiatus necessitated by US network television’s present policy of commissioning half a series at a time: the remaining nine parts resume on CBS next month, so a time-lag for British viewers is assured.

I certainly would not be viewing so diligently or troubling my readers with the matter, had the show not proved to be such a smash. Its opening half-season won the Best Television Series (Musical or Comedy) at the Golden Globes, over 30 Rock, Entourage, Modern Family and The Office (US version). Of its rivals, 30 Rock won the same award last season, Entourage has been nominated in each of its six years of existence but has never won, The Office (which won in 2003 for its original British manifestation) has been nominated for three of its four seasons without winning and the gloriously funny Modern Family – though in truth nothing like as ground-breaking as its ’70s grandparent Soap – is new like Glee.

More influential on my viewing habits was a phone conversation with a friend whom I shall call Robert. This was early in the run of Glee when I was about to give up on it. Robert is a gay, Jewish, expatriate American who has forgotten more about stage and screen musicals than most people would think it possible to know. He is also pretty damned waspish in his judgments, so when Glee came up in our chat I was braced to be the one who was rather shamefacedly defending it against an onslaught. But the shoe was on the other foot. I found myself the one reaching increasingly for withering scorn and Robert being placatory and forgiving to the show.


Ryan Murphy

In a second conversation on the matter, Robert staggered me by citing two friends whom he had successfully alerted to Glee and snapping at me: “so you’re out of step”. For Pete’s sake. Kinda liking Glee – and I don’t think I make a travesty of Robert’s position if I put his feelings no stronger than that – is not a matter of political correctness. I was instantly reminded of a parallel exchange of emails a few years back with another gay, Jewish, expatriate American of my acquaintance. This was on the subject of the then new Shameless, another drama serial screened on Channel 4 and its satellites, though this one is a British production. Bernard, as I will call him, was unexpectedly antagonistic towards Shameless – “don’t get me wrong,” he protested, “I like Paul Abbott” (he too is in the biz) – and he came out with a putdown of my argument quite as gob-smacking as Robert’s: “well, no one in London likes it”. Sure, Bernard. That’ll be how come the eighth series is shooting as I write, all 22 episodes of it.

But to Glee. The brain behind it is Ryan Murphy whose previous hit show was the most unpleasant thing presently on American television, Nip/Tuck. His new one tells of a high school glee club. These institutions date back some 250 years and have their roots in England where the tradition died out, supplanted by more organised bodies such as municipal choral societies. The American education system has retained the term and some of the form, though not – at any rate in the television version – the habit of singing a cappella. In the serial (and probably in reality too) there is also a significant shot of the “let’s-put-on-a-show-right-here-in-the-barn” side of American showbiz that was crystalised in the 1940s Judy Garland/Mickey Rooney screen musicals.

As that touch of back story suggests, Glee does not exactly turn up new tilth. Essentially, it makes barely any advance on June Allyson and Peter Lawford in Good News in 1947, itself a remake of a 1930 movie that brought a 1927 stage show to the screen. Since then there have been endless variations on the showbiz kids theme, not least the movie, remake and television spin-off of Fame, a short-lived British television serial Britannia High and the Disney Channel franchise High School Musical. Ryan Murphy claims not to have seen the Disneys but someone should tell him that the resemblances are legion. So the form is, you might have thought, bled dry.

Glee has quite a few plot issues to surmount. Apart from the week when the glee club leader’s nemesis figure was absent, every episode’s storyline has hinged on the question of whether the Ohio school’s glee club will survive. Given that the first series runs to 22 episodes and Murphy is negotiating to raise the second to 25, there’s not a lot of tension in these plotlines.

Inevitably there needs to be plenty of soap-opera-ish traffic in the stories but, as many of the inchoate characters are still in their teens, there is a limit to what is available. This would matter less if a consistency of tone and approach were maintained, particularly in the level of realism. For instance, most of the numbers grow from rehearsal, trying out of songs and more-or-less work-in-progress performances. Insofar as these numbers break out of the strict conventions of pseudo-documentary coverage of work (adding orchestration and segueing into finished moves and routines), it’s a perfectly acceptable convention – though it would have been much more interesting (and triumphant if brought off) to go into much more realistic problems of learning and rehearsing and trying-out. The calling up of Hollywood levels of professionalism supposedly to convey the talent of amateur, untrained performers is a convention as old as Hollywood and it’s a missed opportunity that it wasn’t subverted this time.


Matthew Morrison as Will

But beyond that the show goes in for non-naturalistic breaking into song – the car-wash routine in episode three, for instance – which doesn’t occur regularly enough to justify its place. It reads like a loose hand on the tiller, making production decisions based on the moment rather than the big picture. Worse, a show looks undisciplined when it suddenly resorts to conventions that weren’t there from the get-go, such as (here) shifting plot in voice-over. Glee club leader Will and his nemesis Sue are suddenly arguing in v-o and Will then flips the convention further by being made to say “We’re even fighting in our voice-overs”. A programme has to earn the right to throw the rulebook in the air and you don’t achieve that being doggedly conventional up to that point. I’m reminded that Murphy told The New York Daily News last May that “we’re going to keep everything pretty reality-based”. Clearly one man’s reality is another’s intrinsically disordered perception.

Soap opera storylines are historically associated with female characters, of whom Glee has a full complement. Here too, though, the plotting doesn’t maintain a consistent reality. Glee offers simultaneously a secret pregnancy and a fake pregnancy, both expected by the women bearing them to go full term without anyone finding out. The fake pregnancy is indulged by Will’s wife Terri, who manifests a range of pretty much certifiable neuroses yet who seems intended to be – and is certainly played as – a comic character. Terri is clearly not meant to be seen as sympathetic because her erratic and selfish behaviour is a torment to Will, the male lead. The serial keeps signalling that we root for Will to get together with Emma, the school guidance counsellor, herself prey to (no doubt highly amusing) neuroses.

Aside from Emma, who is so flaky, all the adult women and most of the girls in the show are more or less of a nightmare. Four of the adult women so far introduced have suffered a drinking problem, which suggests Murphy has a fixation that he should look at. All in all, this is certainly not a show that does women any favours.


Lea Michele, Cory Monteith as Rachel, Finn

The treatment of “minorities” is yet worse. The founding members of the glee club include Mercedes who is black, Kurt who is gay, Artie who is in a wheelchair and Tina who is oriental. But these are all peripheral characters. The teen storylines concern primarily Rachel, whose immediately clear role is that of a demanding, striving Barbra Streisand, a resemblance given voice to more than once in dialogue, Finn the big sports lunk who is reluctantly shoe-horned into glee and whose steady is Quinn, the cheerleaders’ leader. Quinn’s is the (initially) secret pregnancy – of course, because she’s “president of the celibacy club” – and Finn is the (wrongly) designated father. Finn and Quinn and their daughter … um … Winn? It’s like Maurice and Doris Norris and their son Boris.

But back to the supernumeraries, who might be more interesting if given a hearing. Take Artie: in the pilot, he initially leads a rendition of Frank Loesser’s ‘Sit Down, You’re Rocking the Boat’ and the self-congratulation emanating from the script meeting is deafening. From then on, it becomes crystal clear that Artie is never going to be more than a token figure but it’s actually worse than that because all the physical business with him is quite demeaning, usually effectively rolling him out of the way. And the script keeps reinforcing the unchallenged notion from “bad” characters that disadvantaged people are “losers”.

It’s episode nine before Artie has anything more than two lines and gets (part of) a solo: ‘I’m Dancin’ with Myself’ (think poignant). To get them to understand Artie’s situation better, Will makes the other kids spend a few scenes (only when convenient to the plot) in wheelchairs, so the emphasis on the matter in this episode in practice excludes Artie himself. Nice. But perhaps the worst thing about the figure of Artie is that the actor who plays him is a perfectly able-bodied dancer. How completely shabby.

In episode eleven, the glee gang encounter rival school clubs. One is a sink school, so of course its students and teachers are all black or Hispanic. The other is a deaf school whose teacher seems not to know that he himself is deaf. Yeah, right. Fun-ny. When the deaf choir begin ‘Imagine’, in sign language and brave sprechgesang that they can’t hear, it’s genuinely moving (because genuine) but Murphy can’t bring himself to let it play so the regular principals join in, take over and soon overwhelm it.


"Minorities"

It’s odd how bad art contrives to throw up lines that betray its own lack of awareness and Glee is typical. “The minority students don’t feel they’re being heard” comes up in episode seven, and how true this is of the show itself. At the end of episode eleven, Will promises “no false theatricals” but, oh Will, the damage was done long ago. In a group discussion about celibacy (episode two), the comic relief is ugly, bespectacled and Jewish. “You know?” cries Rachel. “This is a joke”. Yup. Later, this particular “loser” tries to blackmail Rachel into flashing her bra. As we know, ugly people in glasses are so sexually frustrated that they don’t know how to behave.

Another supernumerary is introduced for Will to tell the story in flashback – another non-established convention – of a student who had a crush on him. That she is a conveniently passing character and ugly to boot – she wears glasses! – seems to make it all right for Will to treat her in a way that is callous, cruel, insensitive and stupid, just what a teacher should be doing. Will’s behaviour is offered as acceptable because the girl is “a loser”.

But the whole serial is stiff with examples of grotesquely unprofessional behaviour, usually under gratuitous and convenient coercion: a gynaecologist falsifying his findings, a headmaster buckling to the fear that a ridiculous viral of his appearance on a commercial will be seen by the pupils, a school nurse appointed with no qualifications because Terri fancies doing the job (like you do) so that she can keep an eye on Will. How fortunate that she must have cleared the checks for sexual offences against children.

In the first episode, the stall is set out by Will planting dope on Finn as a means of pressuring him into the club, an act that passes muster on no test of any kind. But if Will’s occasional action is unacceptable in anyone, let alone a teacher, the behaviour of Sue, his sworn enemy, is beyond the bounds throughout. The very opening line of the pilot has her berating her cheerleaders: “You think this is hard? Try being waterboarded, that’s hard”. Later, she cries: “I’m living with hepatitis, that’s hard” and she advises Will “you do with your depressing little group of kids what I did with my wealthy, elderly mother: euthanise them”. Does CBS really think all this is appropriate? Why not have her say: “Try being sued by Dan Rather, that’s hard”?


Jane Lynch plays Sue

Sue gets taken on as a pundit by the local television station. She tells her viewers: “You know, I’m tired of hearing people complain – ‘I’m riddled with disease’ or ‘I was in that tsunami’. To them I say ‘shake it up a bit, get out of your box, even if that box happens to be where you’re living'." Ohio should rise up against this travesty of what it would accept. The line between making fun out of political incorrectness and being gratuitously insensitive is a fine one. In episode six, Emma says of Sue: “I can’t believe she’s allowed to teach at this school”. Indeed. Neither can I.

Jane Lynch who plays Sue is one of the vanishingly few lesbian thespians in Hollywood and the aforementioned Robert seems to think this vests Glee with some special credibility. Well, Ryan Murphy is out gay too but any chance that I might have given the show the benefit of the doubt is stymied by its clumping treatment of gay stuff. The moment you know for sure that Murphy has no sense of what his responsibility is to his own or any other community is that moment in episode eight when you note that all the black boys on the school football team are the homophobic ones. Nice, from every point of view.

Kurt, the gay character, makes his bow singing ‘Mr Cellophone’. We’re asked to believe, by the way, that this son of a car mechanic can afford what he claims is an Alexander McQueen sweater, if you please. Like no showbiz boy since A Chorus Line, he seems to have gender issues alongside his closet issues. When I complained that Kurt was as marginalised as all the other “non-regular” characters, Robert had watched episode four as I had not. “You’ll see” he promised. In that episode, Kurt pretends to his dad that he is interested in football and then – goodness gracious! – is discovered to be a brilliant natural kicker of the ball, is promptly signed to the team on the strength of one four-square kick and goes on to win the next match single-handed. Remarkably, this transformation of his status at the school is never alluded to again.

How depressingly regressive that the only way a gay boy can be accepted in a school in the 21st century is as a closeted jock. Anyway, Kurt turns out in episode eleven to be selfish and treacherous, a point needed in the plotting of relations between Finn and Rachel. Marginal characters only ever have to be consistently sympathetic if they are due to die long before the end. It’s a Hollywood rule.


Chris Colfer plays Kurt

Kurt has a secret crush on Finn. “I don’t know why I find his stupidity charming” he says and nor do we. Finn is pretty damned stupid and not (as played) especially charming. Cory Monteith, cast as Finn, is just an inexpressive dope and, rather crucially, a really terrible mover. It’s bewildering how this boy got the part. Hollywood needs a big, sweet chucklehead every so often but they don’t go on to have useful careers unless they have discernible talent (remember Chris Klein?). Matthew Morrison as glee club teacher Will is a bozo too. Teri Hatcher’s Susan is a bozo but in Desperate Housewives it doesn’t matter because the other three leading women are magnificent, rounded, original creations and they carry Susan with good grace. There’s no one to carry Will so his weakness as both character and performance is cruelly exposed. We’re asked – twice in quick succession – to buy him as a rapper in episode eight. Oh please.

In fact whether the cast can sing is hard to say because the miming gives no unmistakeable sense that each voice we hear is coming from the actor’s mouth. That voice might be an unseen singer, like Marni Nixon or the cruelly treated little girl at the Beijing Olympics. At least with Garland and Rooney and indeed Lawford (painful!) and Allyson there’s no doubt it’s them singing.

That’s the central flavour of Glee for me. It never tastes organic. The plot contrivances are to get us through a problem of filling the commercial hour rather than of building the kind of big, colourful marching parade that a long-running American serial needs to be. So we get the one-episode woodshop teacher who has severed his own thumbs in a dumb accident, evidently present solely to make up the numbers of a short-lived sideline singing group. Then there is the character who dominates episode five, ‘The Rhodes Not Taken’. There was me thinking this was going to be a smart gag about Rhodes Scholarships, the kind you’re used to from my posting titles. But no, the featured guest was one April Rhodes, a washed-up former member of an earlier glee club. No doubt she got her name because CBS owns the Rhodes Electric Piano Company.


Jayma Mays plays Emma

Glee arrives in a strong era of continuing drama on American television. When it invites direct comparison with its seniors, it withers: the episode four scene where Will’s sister-in-law freaks Terri with an unforgivingly frank account of childbirth went up against a similar but far superior scene in Desperate Housewives that week; meanwhile, Emma is the Bernadette Peters role in Glee but Ugly Betty trumps it completely – in the Bernadette Peters role, it has Bernadette Peters.

Mysteriously, the Gleeful Robert doesn’t watch either Ugly Betty or Desperate Housewives (let alone True Blood). Perhaps I need to take a deep breath, brave his certain indignation and inform him that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about