When the Spanish Teacher Starts Rapping
At some point in the first season of Glee, the school’s Spanish teacher—a well-meaning himbo in too-tight vests—processes his feelings by rapping on a football field. This should be the moment you give up on the whole thing. Instead it’s the moment you understand exactly what the show is doing and why it works despite absolutely everything.
I’d assumed we were done with this. High School Musical happened, then Camp Rock, and then—surely—we’d collectively agreed to let the singing-teenagers genre retire with some dignity. I was wrong. Glee arrived on FOX in 2009 and immediately became inescapable, so I spent a night watching the entire first season—twenty-two episodes—instead of opening a textbook. That was probably the correct decision.
The setup is the setup: a misfit glee club at an American high school, populated by exactly the archetypes you’d expect. There’s the Asian girl who turns out to be faking her stutter, the nerd in the wheelchair, the cheerleading queen who is significantly more complicated than her uniform suggests. The club director is the aforementioned rapping Spaniard, well-intentioned and catastrophically uncool. Around them: a guidance counselor with debilitating OCD, soft drinks hurled at the unpopular, a world that operates on dream logic where emotions are expressed in song and nobody thinks this is unusual.
What it actually delivers is the FOX formula in school uniform—The O.C. with choir practice instead of beach parties: hot love triangles, knowing humor, schemes within schemes. The plotting is miles below Skins in terms of weight or consequence. But Skins never had characters you wanted to spend twenty-two hours with in a single sitting. That’s what Glee gets right almost by accident. The people are genuinely fun to be around, even when the sentiment threatens to swallow everything else.
Watch it, if this is the kind of thing you’ll allow yourself. Tell people you’re watching it for a younger sibling—that’s a workable strategy and I’ve used it. For anyone who can’t get near the musical-teen revival with a long pole, Castle was airing at the same time and will not once require you to feel something about an Avril Lavigne cover.