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ramblingaboutglee · 1 year

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Season 6 - What Glee Should Be

Okay hear me out, I have a point I swear

Glee was cancelled going into S6. A half-length season, everyone knew it was over. There was no need to hold back, no need to compromise - and what we got was a highly divisive season that nevertheless feels like it was what the writers wanted to be doing for the last five years.

Note the focus on teacher-roles, Rachel instructing the New New New Directions, and Will and Sue’s rivalry taking the fore in later episodes. Note how none of the students get any more than one episode arcs, where even romantic subplots are constrained to single episodes unless it’s drama surrounding the teachers. It’s reminiscent of Season 1 of Glee, before the show was re-geared to be about the kids rather than Will and Emma.

But now the original kids are the teachers having the romantic subplot, creating an interesting middle-ground. But all in all, this feels so much more like the show that Glee was intended to be, now that there were no consequences for unpopularity or low ratings. It’s easy to imagine that, had the fandom not focused so much on the students, this might have been what Glee would have always looked like.

Does this mean it was good? That’s always going to be down to personal taste. But certainly, it is interesting to see the thought process shift.

Let’s look at them side by side

But seriously. There’s no escaping the fact that a lot of the heyday of Glee, and a lot of the things the fandom loves, weren’t part of the show’s original conception. There were always character arcs with the kids, a dash of acknowledging some real-world topics, but it was through the lens of, well, Will Schuester as the main character. Which is a sentence that feels so weird to type, but watching the pilot, watching the first season (especially 1A), it’s undeniable.

The show is about a teacher who learns from his kids, and through doing so has their life improved and helps figure out what they want in life and in their relationships. It’s about the idea of wasting your youth, and trying to recapture that and live your dreams even after feeling like you let them pass you by. That’s Glee season 1, before they had any idea of the huge fanbase they had, and what that fanbase wanted.

And Glee season 6? Rachel returns to McKinley, unsure of her place in life, and as she figures it out she chooses to become a teacher. She goes from hitting a low point, at the start of the season, to sorting out her priorities, finding romance again, and finding joy in helping others get the spotlight rather than being in it herself. And in much the same way, Blaine gets a comparable journey, going from a relationship that gets an alarming amount of vitriol, to finding himself with the Warblers, the school he went to originally, and having that help spark his development. Both of them have left behind successful performances to, well, teach Glee after something in their life crashed.

Rachel, Blaine and Will all get the same story.

Plus, of course, the throwback to building the Glee club one member at the time.

Parallel lines, who meet

You could complain about repetition. I’d argue that’s the point. Going to S1 again, it’s all about the parallels - right from the Pilot, Will and Terri and Emma are paralleled with Rachel and Quinn and Finn. There are a dozen tiny examples threaded throughout, like Quinn and Puck naming Beth and the immediate next scene being Shelby asking Rachel why her dads named her that - Glee likes to lay adult and teenage life side by side, and look at similarities and differences.

We’d be here a while if we listed everything. In S1, 3 and 4 especially, the show loves to compare and contrast - so having the original teens live the same arc as the teacher, well, it’s not unexpected. (shout out to Final Countdown having Kurt and Rachel watch Will and Sue have their sing-off and “...We cannot end up like them.”)

The echoes are the point. And when Glee goes out, it goes for parallels between Will and the kids, just like it did when it began.

Ain’t we got fun?

I feel like humour is going to be one of the most divisive things about S6. For me, it was a breath of fresh air - S5 had definitely gotten a little stale with some of the jokes. It referenced for the sake of referencing sometimes, and had grand set pieces that were played up like they were funny, and... weren’t, so it just ended up feeling a little weird.

S6, at least, is different. Love or hate Sue’s terrifying shipper-robot, it’s certainly not just a rehash of an old joke. Sue as an adversary is nothing new, but the dynamic she has in S6 as the over-the-top principal is different. There is imagination to a lot of the new quips, whether or not they work for you.

Then we have The Final Countdown, which harkens back to Run Joey Run and Baby Got Back as an unabashedly comedic musical number. The season gets a couple of those, and while the genre seems despised by the fandom, the writers seem to enjoy them, so given the chance, they added more.

It’s interesting. I’d probably say that one of the biggest issues Glee ran into was how it started to feel samey, and I wonder if that was a result of the same thought process that governed the show after S1 - trying to just do the things that the fandom reacted to. And when it’s too late to get the fandom back, they have the freedom to go for different things. There is genuine effort to do different rather than just do more - which inevitably runs the risk of alienating fans, but they were cancelled anyway so...

Lending a shoulder

So let’s talk about the social awareness side. How does S6 fare?

Honestly, surprisingly well. It’s still Glee, so not perfect, but there were beats that I noticed while watching that genuinely felt like an apology.

So let’s talk about Beiste. There is nuance here. Coach Beiste comes out as a trans man this season - I’ve seen this criticised, and I understand the criticism, that it undercuts Beiste’s arc in previous seasons. Originally, the depiction of a cis woman who was not conventionally attractive nor conventionally feminine still wanting acknowledgement and respect was, in its way, radical - then again, Beiste has had very little to do for a while. If the alternative was nothing, then I’m content with mere continuity wonkiness.

So let’s talk about the quality of this depiction. Glee’s previous foray into trans issues is Unique, and right from her name you get that uncomfortable vibe that they were just writing a drag queen, and there is that distinct undercurrent to some of her appearances. There was some good, but there was also a lot of... well, just imagine a ‘you tried’ star here.

Then comes Sheldon Beiste. I think this was the first time the word ‘transgender’ was actually said on the show. He’s explicit, upfront, takes a name that isn’t just ‘Badass’ or some such, and is otherwise presented and treated as just a guy, with other characters treating him without the transphobia Unique faced. Plus there is the off-handed scene where he mentions that he’s always been attracted to guys, and that’s probably not going to change - a mainstream show acknowledging that not all trans people are straight in 2015 feels bizarrely radical, especially after Unique.

Then there was Becky getting an episode that pretty much just existed to call out how she’d been consistently infantilised in previous seasons. Honestly that was one I had to google after the episode was done because there are a lot of things I don’t know about Down’s - the fact Glee of all shows got that reaction is kinda impressive.

Certainly, there are bits that are handled with the usual lack of tact, but there is a surprising amount to admire here. Which then, again, makes for a season one comparison and makes me wonder - in S1, the major dynamics that went for commentary were Kurt’s relationship with his dad, and Quinn’s arc dealing with conservative-family expectation and pressures, and a lot of that is well-handled compared to what a lot of people might expect from Glee going forwards.

There’s a lot of potential speculation there, but if nothing else, it indicates the season wasn’t low-effort.

Being the kids, as well as the sitter

Glee is about growing up, and it’s about what that means. We have a season where the teacher takes centre stage, like was originally planned, only it’s teachers that more people care about - Rachel, Kurt and Blaine probably have more fans than Will.

But what of the kids?

Given that they only have half a season, they’re impressive. It helps that they’re well cast - most only really get one or two big songs, but they’re able to nail them (if you haven’t, go listen to Roderick’s Take Me To Church, thank you), and all of them feel distinct from previous archetypes. There are also fresh dynamics here - Roderick and Spencer’s neat friendship, Jane fitting in with Dalton is brand new, Mason and Madison offer a sibling dynamic we surprisingly haven’t seen before given how rarely Glee has siblings (Kurt and Finn didn’t really act it, and Puck and Jake had few interactions).

Again, there’s genuine effort and freshness put into them, but it’s effort with the understanding that they aren’t leads. They don’t get multi-episode focuses on any love triangles or romance plots, they’re unmistakable secondary characters but it’s in that role that they thrive.

Is season 6 the best season of the show? No. And it’s one it’s easy to imagine being hated, because it is a departure from previous seasons. I could list flaws - there’s a lack of focus, a desire to bring back characters that can give a very scattershot approach, and some dynamics do feel definitely underexplored. There’s no arc to compare to, say, Quinn’s development in S1.

But for a half-length season that’s also wrapping up past characters, it does about as well as it reasonably could.

It really feels like this was the show that they meant to make, though. You can feel the extra effort that goes into it - plus the music that was selected sticks out. A Burt Bacharach episode, a Carole King/Alanis Morisette episode, these are definitely from the era and genres that the writers showed a preference for earlier on. We get another Queen song, we get Styx as the finale - bands that have both appeared before. This is a victory lap. There are certainly more modern songs included, but it’s reminiscent of, again, Season 1 thriving on the back of Journey and showtunes and Queen, before a younger audience made them insert more contemporary music. It feels as though the songs they’re including are the songs that the writers like, rather than leaning on chart-toppers - the Bacharach theme episode is one of the lowest watched episodes in the show’s run, which is kind of shocking given how easily artist-focus episodes could get a bump in viewership. For some reason though, fans of a songwriter whose heyday was in the 1950s/60s don’t cross over massively with Glee.

And yet they went for it. Why? Because they wanted to, they liked the songs (Bacharach tends to be basically showtune-adjacent, you’ll find a wealth of musical singers who’ll do his songs for albums and concerts), as we can tell by S1 using his ‘I Say A Little Prayer.’ This is what the show would have been if there was no care about what the audience wanted.

For me, the biggest flaw with Glee was the fact that they had no bloody idea what they wanted the show to be, or who the target audience even was. It goes from edgy teenage comedy, to teachable-moment kids’ show, to shockingly nuanced adult drama.

Hence the title of this ramble - this is what Glee feels like it was meant to be, regardless of personal taste. How much a show should listen to its audience is a heck of a complex question, way too much to go into this far into an already too-long ramble, but it’s still interesting to see. When they aren’t trying to balance intent and audience, you get a fascinating lens through which to look at the show.

There is effort here, which raises the question - if this is the show that they wanted to make, as it seems to be with how effective it is as a redo of the original season and original intent of the show and thereby the interests of the writers, what does that say of past seasons? Where are the compromises, where are the decisions made to feed into what the fandom wanted? And are the departures from this vision strengths or weaknesses?

I feel like everyone’s going to have a different answer to that question, and I do wonder if that’s why Glee fandom often seems so divided. Functionally, there are two shows going on here - it just depends which you were tuning in to see.

#Glee #Glee Meta #Glee Season 6 #Rachel Berry #Roderick Meeks #Spencer Porter #Jane Hayward #Madison McCarthy #Mason McCarthy #Kurt Hummel #Will Schuester

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