(20th Century Fox TV)
“I give up,” I told my roommate. “Why does everyone like Glee so much?”
“Oh, it’s great,” she said. “The acting is good, the writing is smart, it’s funny—have you ever watched it?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Every week!”
It’s true. Glee, which finished its first 13-episode season last week, has been default viewing all fall, for the expedient reason that it was on immediately before Top Chef. My girlfriend and I have slogged through its nails-on-blackboard sap—the rival glee club from a school for the deaf, anyone?—just like the rest of America. But the show’s brightly colored, tongue-in-cheek tone is appealing, and Jane Lynch, as the villainous cheerleading coach, gets to chow down on the scenery, per usual. Still, it’s pretty anodyne—and not only that, it makes for serious cognitive dissonance when each episode comes to a dead stop whenever the show’s ostensible reason for being comes around. Or, as I put it to my roommate: “The music sucks.”
“Oh, well,” she said. “That’s a whole other thing.”
It sure is. It’s telling that Lea Michele’s rendition of Funny Girl‘s “Don’t Rain on My Parade” is the best thing the show has managed thus far: The Broadway-bound, enunciate-
everything show-tune tradition Glee extols is wasted on rock and pop songs that weren’t built for it. If, in
the show’s scenario, Matthew Morrison’s twinkle-eyed good-guy glee-club coach stumbling through an ill-advised rendition of Young MC’s “Bust a Move” is silly, off-screen it’s just stupid—if all you can bring to the table for a song that trades in punch lines is a mild bluff jokiness, don’t bother. Amber Riley (the cast’s requisite sassy black chick) has big pipes and no idea how to convey credible emotion with them: The version of Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me” that she leads might as well be called “Look at Me!”
The cast’s version of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” begins audaciously, with a section of stacked vocal harmony that sounds like a Steve Reich passage, but the cheer-squad verses just sound squeaky-clean clueless, so pristine it makes the overblown original sound gritty by comparison. Even that has nothing on the nauseating versions of “True Colors” and “Imagine” from the aforementioned deaf-squad episode. But there’s hope: Michele seems to recognize the show’s camp value better than anyone, as when she winks through Wham!’s “Last Christmas.” Better that than drowning in your own treacle. 