I want to love Glee, honestly. I watched last spring’s pilot three times, revelling in the show’s choir outcasts, its cheer-coach villain Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch), its expectations-upending “Rehab” performance and the “Don’t Stop Believing” climax.
Since then, though, Glee has been wildly inconsistent. Instead of a musical Freaks & Geeks, it has eschewed depth for whiplash plot twists, cartoonish stereotypes, stupid pregnancy storylines, over-produced lip-syncing and, as Simon Cowell would say, poor song choice.
There have been highlights over the half-season: the ever-crackling Lynch and cute Jayma Mays; Lea Michele’s lungs and surprisingly nuanced portrayals by Mark Salling (Puck) and Dianna Agron (Quinn); the tart one-liners; Kurt coming out to his dad; and Kristin Chenoweth belting out Heart’s “Alone.” But these are moments without momentum. The producers may consider their show a mash-up but they’ve forgotten how to make their disparate parts gel into a cohesive whole. It could be a matter of too many cooks. Co-creators Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan and Brad Falchuk take turns writing and seem to have different ideas of how they want Glee to be, tonally. Or maybe the pilot was just too good.
The TV critic mantra is: never trust a pilot. First episodes are experiments. Most never make it to air, they rarely have big budgets and the casts can change. Plenty of relatively recent TV classics — Seinfeld, 30 Rock — began with egregious pilots while both The Office and Parks and Rec struggled creatively until season two. Supernatural didn’t get good until year four.
That’s why a fully realized pilot makes people lose their shit. Lost, for example, crash-landed with developed characters, spectacular effects and intriguing WTF quirks — and a guy got sucked into a jet propeller!
Yet FlashForward, Lost’s heir apparent, has enjoyed an even sharper decline than Glee after a mind-blowing pilot. The world’s population collectively loses consciousness and sees six months into the future, 20 million people die in the process and we’re supposed to care about alcoholism storylines? FlashForward’s lead is played by charisma black hole Joseph Fiennes, but the writers are little better, failing to explore the matters of fate, determinism and spirituality raised in the pilot.
FlashForward still has potential. The recent ascension of co-creator (and Dark Knight writer) David Goyer to the rank of showrunner bodes well, beginning with next Thursday’s episode where, as Goyer told Entertainment Weekly, “the game really starts to change.” Similarly, Glee’s Murphy told the LA Times that standout episode “Wheels” will inform his show’s future because it made him “feel the responsibility of showing the truth of the pain that outcasts go through.”
But it also wouldn’t hurt if both creators went back and watched their pilots for a reminder of how right they can get it.
Glee airs 9pm, Wednesdays on Global/Fox; FlashForward airs 8pm, Thursdays on CTV/ABC.