‘Glee’ Feels Like Its From Another Era (Because It Was)

Recently, I decided to embark on a truly insane streaming challenge. I decided to rewatch all of Ryan Murphy‘s musical masterpiece Glee. So far the resulting binge has been one of the most emotional, frustrating, and hair-rippingly insane experiences in my entire career of watching television professionally. It was and is a beautiful nightmare, and I recommend that everyone take the same plunge.

Most people seem to have the same complicated relationship with Glee as I do. When the show first premiered in 2009, I adored it, and for a brief but not insignificant time during my college life, it stood as a must-watch event. But as time went on and the series became progressively more insane, I started to fall off. Despite my deep love for Kurt (Chris Colfer) and my conflicting appreciation of and frustration with Rachel (Lea Michele), I stopped watching somewhere around Season 3. The show continued on for three more seasons without me. But during the show’s 121 episodes, Glee never stopped being the confusing, complicated, and aspirational mess it was from its first episode.

More than perhaps anything else, Glee is a show defined by hope — hope in its characters’ dreams, hope that one day television will be more inclusive, hope that this next episode will be better than the last. Even under the haze of time, Glee’s first episode still stands as one of the strongest pilots ever made. Within a span of minutes, Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan perfectly capture the dynamic personalities of each of the show’s main characters. There’s Rachel (Michele), the overly ambitious performer who will one day be a star, Quinn (Dianna Agron), the ice queen in charge of the school, Kurt (Colfer), a closeted teenager with a flair for the dramatic, and Finn (Cory Monteith), the quarterback with a heart of gold who can make the Glee Club into a force to be reckoned with if only he’ll give it a chance. And then there’s Mr. Schuester (Matthew Morrison), the everyman hero teacher who might be able to make this crazy club work solely through love and perseverance. Rewatching that pilot, I couldn’t help but tear up as the Glee Club hopefully belted out “Don’t Stop Believin” in an attempt to uplift Mr. Schu. That first, brilliant episode captures so many challenges so well — the lack of funding for the arts in public education, the struggles of balancing passion and popularity in high school, the cost of dreams. It’s a nearly perfect hour of television.

Cut to 20 episodes later, the Glee Club finally learns that their arch singing rival Vocal Adrenaline only has one weakness — they can’t sing funk songs. After a painful hour devoted to watching a bunch of nerdy Glee kids skim over the emotional complexities of funk, New Directions then travels to Regionals to compete against their foes. They never perform any of the numbers the show establishes can weaken their biggest opponent. New Directions then loses Regionals.

That’s what it’s like to watch Glee in the binge-watching age. Almost every episode ends in a huge cliffhanger, a format choice that made the series a can’t-miss event when it premiered on a weekly basis. Those narrative loose ends barely made sense when they first premiered, but a seven day buffer paired with Glee‘s patented recaps and  that week’s  flashy musical number made this an easy problem to forgive. Watching Glee now, that’s no longer the case. The series is a whiplash of often contradictory reveals. Mr. Schu will be sacrificing base necessities to support the Glee Club one minute only to turn around and abandon or sabotage the club on a whim the next.

Glee is also a show that knows no villains. Either you’re a good guy who messes up on occasion or you’re misunderstood. The series has redemption plots galore for  everyone — the cheating Quinn, the bully who threatened to kill Kurt, and for arguably the one true (and brilliant) foe in the whole series, Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch). That’s not to say anything about the Glee Club’s allegedly tiny budget. You don’t perform a choreographed and water-filled mashup of “Umbrella” and “Singing in the Rain” with Gwyneth Paltrow to an empty theater if you don’t have money.

And yet between all of these insane plot loops, frustrating character choices, and the show’s smug tone about how groundbreaking its inclusivity is, there’s hope. Hope that Rachel will come back to her senses, and the show will tone things down enough to remember its authentic, sweet start. More often than not, the series gets too distracted by its celebrity and theme of the week to remember its underdog status. However, when Glee does remember its emotional side, it truly is a beautiful thing. Kurt’s romance with Blaine (Darren Criss), Artie’s (Kevin McHale) ruminations about being differently abled, Sue’s relationships with Becky (Lauren Potter‎) and her sister — these were all genuinely moving and heartfelt stories that most shows wouldn’t dare to touch. There are great moments in Glee, moments of hope. They’re just buried under cringeworthy versions of “Empire State of Mind.”

So why did I decide to jump back into Glee now, after Cory Monteith’s tragic death, after the duel weddings, after the ill-conceived “Shooting Star”? (It should be noted that I officially started my rewatch on January 24, a couple weeks before Mark Salling’s suicide.) Some of it had to do with my own fuzzy memory. Was Glee really as crazy as I remembered? The answer, by the way, is yes. Part of it was curiosity. Even though I lived through this television craze and was part of it, the idea that pop culture could be dominated by a high school singing show is so insane, it sounds like a plot from Glee. But the main reason I wanted to rewatch was out of respect to Murphy and his most recent shows.

There was Nip/Tuck, but it was Glee closely followed by American Horror Story: Murder House that cemented Ryan Murphy as the creator and master of television we now know him to be. It’s difficult to argue that television has become more inclusive directly because of Glee, but it’s hard not to see a correlation between the two. Glee was never afraid to directly address what made its characters different, but it also treated them as people first, socially conscious plot points second. That’s a direction television as a whole has benefited from and that Murphy has embraced in making more serious shows like FEUD and American Crime Story.

Glee is a consistently insane, frustrating, and eye-rolling binge in 2018, but that’s a good thing. Television has gotten better about portraying and embracing more diverse stories with nuance than it was when we were first introduced to New Directions. Now instead of standing as one of the only shows willing to talk about homophobia, mental illness, and racism (though that was one of Glee‘s biggest socially-conscious weakness), it can now stand as the insane watch it was always destined to be.

 

Where to stream Glee