Glee: Can a musical show work where others have failed? – Guest Clack

Elizabeth Gendler, today’s Guest-clacker, is another aspiring writer who came to LA from the Midwest after college. She’s worked as an intern, script reader, secretary, and shipping clerk (most of it even for pay!). Not having done much in the way of blogging before, she’s excited to be using her compulsive TV-watching for good rather than evil.

Probably the most interesting thing about Glee is that it’s already done so much better with the audience than anything else centered around music. As some of us are lucky — or maybe unlucky — enough to know, that pretty much consists of Cop Rock and Viva Laughlin (If you don’t know either of those shows, well, that’s my point.)

But after Fox showed the pilot of Glee last spring and started releasing clips, lots of people have been talking about it — saying good things, even, which is really more than either Cop Rock or Viva Laughlin had going for them. Glee was met with a little skepticism that it might be a little too High School Musical-esque for a general audience, and a portion of the audience still thinks it is, but there are still a lot of people watching and excited about it.

There are a lot of things Glee does right that Cop Rock, or Viva Laughlin (which I actually sat through), didn’t. For one thing, Glee works the musical numbers in much more organically: most are actually being performed by the characters themselves, and the rest are played as taking place in somebody’s mind, a kind of imaginary performance. The movie version of Chicago a few years ago did the same thing and was also successful. So far, Glee has been able to avoid the problem of kids spontaneously breaking out in choreographed song-and-dance numbers.

Most importantly, the writers have clearly worked hard to get the tone right. While the show has respect for the characters (well, you know, to an extent) and is sympathetic to them (again, you, know…), as a whole it doesn’t take itself too seriously and keeps the tone light. You know, like those ’80s family sitcoms, but not as lame.

Which brings up another question: is Glee a family show? Well, that depends on the family. It does provide some good opportunities for really, really uncomfortable conversations between teenagers and their parents (which as we all know is such an important part of family life), and it shows a less melodramatic perspective on teen sexuality and social lives than you usually find on ABC Family or Lifetime.

So the real reason Glee works as well as it does is that it hasn’t lost sight of the sense of fun that’s so important to any musical. Some parts of the audience already thinks it’s a pretty ridiculous show, and it might get more so in the future, but right now they’ve managed to walk the line pretty well. Considering that the creator, Ryan Murphy, is also the guy behind Nip/Tuck, he already knows a lot about how far to push boundaries without alienating too much of the audience. Can he manage the same thing with network TV standards? Only time will tell which side blinks first.

Clacked by Guest Clacker
on Oct 15, 2009 @ 14:00 EST5EDT