My Wednesday nights were considerably brighter this fall thanks to Fox’s new runaway hit Glee, the hands-down best new show of this television season and one of my favorite shows to watch over the past few months.
A real “feel good” show with broad appeal is a truly rare thing. The last one I can remember in recent history was Everybody Loves Raymond, which was in the top ten in number of viewers for the last five of its nine seasons on the air (and ranked #11 and #12 in its third and fourth seasons). If its numbers since the season premiere in September (the series officially started with a pilot that aired in May) are any indication, Glee looks to follow in Raymond’s footsteps.
Glee takes place at the fictitious William McKinley high school in Lima, Ohio and follows the lives of members of the school’s show choir (also known as a glee club) and their director, William Schuester.
Will, played by Broadway actor Matthew Morrison (best known for originating Link Larkin in Hairspray, Fabrizio Naccarelli in The Light in the Piazza and Lieutenant Joseph Cable in the most recent Broadway revival of South Pacific), is the school’s Spanish teacher and takes over as director of the glee club when the former director is caught being inappropriate with a favorite member. He intends to return the glee club, which is viewed rather unfavorably by most of the students and faculty, to its former glory when he was a member.
Vehemently opposed to this effort is the best new character on television this season, Sue Sylvester. Portrayed with the perfect blend of unabashed arrogance, caustic sarcasm and pure vindictiveness by veteran comedic actress Jane Lynch (she got her start with The Second City comedy troupe and appeared in Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries Best in Show and A Mighty Wind), she is the coach of the school’s championship cheerleading squad, The Cheerios, who is insulted that the school would funnel even the slightest amount of the ridiculous funding for her team (their uniforms are dry cleaned in Europe) to Will’s kids and vows to destroy the club.
Despite all of Sue’s devious and underhanded machinations, Will manages to grow the club and develop them into star performers. Initially, the squad, now named “New Directions,” consists only of a handful of the school’s outcasts, most notably Rachel Berry, an assertive and very talented sophomore with dreams of making it to Broadway. Rachel, the Jewish only child of a gay interracial couple, is strong, ambitious and somewhat spoiled, telling “Mr. Schue” that she wants her high school life “to mean something” and that she cannot waste her time on glee club if he can’t find a male lead worthy of her talent. Lea Michele, a Broadway actress with a Drama Desk Award nomination and a Grammy Award for her work in the hit musical Spring Awakening, plays Rachel with just enough spunk and determination that even when she annoys you with her diva behavior you still feel compelled to root for her because of how much heart she has.
Rachel’s stiffest competition in the club is the vocally endowed Mercedes Jones, played by the talented Amber Riley (who surprisingly was turned down by American Idol six years ago). Mercedes is not quite as big a diva as Rachel is but seems more than up to the challenge, getting in Will’s face when he first puts her in a back-up role and later breaking the front windshield of a fellow club member when she feels his attentions diverted towards another. It seems appropriate that we first meet her during her audition in which she sings Aretha Franklin’s “Respect.” In addition to that song, Amber belts amazing solos in her covers of “Bust Your Windows,” “Hate on Me” and “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.”
Less combative, and far less developed a character, is Tina Cohen-Chang, played by Broadway actress Jenna Ushkowitz. I hate to say it, but Tina seems to be little more than a token Asian character, even characterized as stereotypically shy and unconfident. She dresses in a notably goth style, has a stutter (which we later learn is fake) and mostly exists in the background. Aside from singing a shortened version of “Tonight” from West Side Story, a task assigned to her character not to show off her singing talents but to set up a conflict which results in Rachel leaving the club for dramatic effect, and getting to perform the lead in “True Colors,” she really has done very little and seems like the only throwaway character of the initial group, which is a disappointment to me as an Asian-American fan.
On the other hand, Artie Abrams, a paraplegic wheelchair user, starts off as more of a background character but slowly and consistently becomes more prominent in the series, even having an episode (the best one of the season so far, I might add) focused on the challenges he faces as a handicapped student at a school that isn’t sensitive to his needs. Played by former boy band member Kevin McHale as a generally happy-go-lucky character with perhaps more of a positive outlook on life than you would expect, Artie seems to be one of the genuinely good-natured members of the club and has a knack for witty observation.
The final member of the original “New Directions” roster is Kurt Hummel, a flamboyant performer with keen fashion sense who comes out as gay to his fellow squad mates early in the series and to his father a little later (few are surprised by this admission). The character of Kurt was created specifically for newcomer Chris Colfer, who auditioned for the role of Artie but so impressed the producers that they invented the new character, named after Kurt von Trapp from The Sound of Music and ceramic Hummel figurines which were popular in the first half of the 20th century. Colfer plays Kurt as a very confident individual, comfortable in his own skin and unwilling to compromise who he is just to fit in better at the school. In fact, at the beginning of the first two episodes of the show, Kurt insists the football squad hold his more expensive articles of clothing and tells them “someday you’ll all work for me” before allowing them to deposit him in the dumpster. Colfer plays up Kurt’s confidence and flamboyance to an entertaining level, making him one of the most popular characters on the show.
Despite the raw talent of his assembled team, Will realizes that they’ll need more members if the team is to succeed at competition and concedes to Rachel’s demand to find a strong male lead to accompany her. After discovering that Finn Hudson, the captain of the football team, has an incredible voice (or so we viewers are to believe despite what our ears are telling us), he uncharacteristically blackmails Finn into joining the glee club, much to Rachel’s delight.
Finn is portrayed by relative newcomer Cory Monteith, who honestly revealed that he got the chance to compete for the part more for the creativity of his audition tape than his singing ability. He is at first uncomfortable with what being in the glee club will do to his social status in the school but perseveres due to his long time (and secret) love for singing, eventually realizing how important it is for him to do what makes him feel happiest. He is also revealed over the course of the first half of the season to be a generally good person who did questionable things in the past just to fit in with the popular kids (and is remorseful for that). During that same time period, he struggles with the added responsibilities of becoming a father in high school and his dashed hopes of leaving Lima to make something of himself.
Meanwhile, Quinn Fabray, Finn’s girlfriend, faces her own struggles related to the pregnancy, particularly the fact that Finn’s best friend, Noah Puckerman, is the actual father (Finn and Quinn never actually had sex but Finn’s not exactly the sharpest tool in the shed). Quinn, played by Dianna Agron, is the quintessential queen bee – she is the captain of the Cheerios and, ironically, the president of the celibacy club, and she acts as the most popular girl in high school in a television show or movie typically does. Despite her often nasty behavior, Quinn is privately scared to death of what the pregnancy will do to her life and is eventually revealed to be nowhere near as confident as she pretends to be. Her evolution as a character is one of the slower ones on the show, but by the midseason finale she seems to have realized what those she thought were her friends think of her and who really cares for her (hint: What’s the name of the show?).
Quinn joins the glee club with her fellow Cheerios Santana Lopez (played by Naya Rivera) and Brittany (no last name ever given, played by Heather Morris) to spy for Sue but eventually comes to love the group and realize that they’ll accept and welcome her instead of judge her like everyone else. Even the bitchy Santana admits in the midseason finale that she is happiest when she is with the glee club despite her unwillingness to let slip that secret to the public. Brittany, on the other hand, seems to have neither an affinity nor an aversion to being in “New Directions” out of pure cluelessness (recipes confuse her and she cheats off mentally handicapped students on tests).
Rounding out the twelve-member show choir squad are three of Finn’s football teammates: “Puck” (as everyone calls Noah), Mike Chang and Matt Rutherford. Mike and Matt, played by Harry Shum, Jr. (a lead dancer for Beyonce, Mariah Carey, Jennifer Lopez, and Jessica Simpson as well as one of the dancing silhouettes in the earlier iPod commercials) and Dijon Talton respectively, become interested in joining the club after seeing a school assembly performance of Salt-n-Peppa’s “Push It”, but Puck, played by Mark Salling, joins out of desire to be near Quinn, for whom he actually has feelings, and prove to her that he’s more than just “a Lima loser” who can’t help raise a child.
Indeed, the love “polygon” amongst the McKinley high students (Rachel is in love with Finn, who has blossoming feelings for her but is in love with Quinn, who very much loves Finn back but also has feelings for her baby’s real father Puck, who has feelings for her all the while dating Santana, who thinks “it’s not dating if it’s just sex,” with Kurt getting in on the action with a crush on Finn) is a bit convoluted but makes for some interesting scenarios.
On the other hand, the love square involving the adult characters is more straightforward. Will is married to his high school sweetheart Terri, a selfish, narcissistic, gold digging former cheerleader (played by Jessalyn Gilsig) who pretends to be pregnant after finding out what she thought was a real pregnancy was actually a hysterical pregnancy out of fear that she and Will are growing apart. To this end, she convinces Quinn to give up the baby so she can raise her as her own. Hey, I just said that the relationships were straightforward, not the related plot lines themselves. 
Meanwhile, guidance counselor Emma Pillsbury, a doe-eyed, unusually bubbly germophobe played by Jayma Mays has a crush on Will, with whom she has what appears to Will to be a very close but platonic friendship. Emma is herself the object of football coach Ken Tanaka’s affections. Ken, played by Patrick Gallagher, is a generally nice, if unrefined, man who realizes that Emma is in love with Will but is willing to be her “consolation” boyfriend, even going so far as to go with Emma’s terms (they’ll still live in separate homes and won’t invite anyone to, or tell anyone about, the wedding) for accepting his marriage proposal.
UPDATE: Congratulations are in order - Glee was nominated for the “Best Television Series – Musical Or Comedy” Golden Globe alongside my other favorite new show of the season, Modern Family. In addition, Matthew Morrison was nominated for “Best Performance by an Actor In a Television Series – Musical Or Comedy,” Lea Michele was nominated for “Best Performance by an Actress In a Television Series – Musical Or Comedy” and Jane Lynch was nominated for “Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television.”
Source: The Hollywood Foreign Press Association
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