Glee!

Glee isn’t exactly a mid season replacement. It’s just a pilot FOX released to springboard the first season next fall, but it’s here, we watched it and now we’re going to talk about it.

Will is a teacher. Will used to do ‘Glee Club’ back when he was in high school. The old Glee Club teacher has been kicked out. Will becomes the new head of Glee Club. He gets six students to sign up. They’re an odd ball collection of misfits.

That’s all you really need to know.

Oh, and there’s singing.

Glee is from the creator of Nip/Tuck and while that means nothing to me as I’ve never seen that show I’m sure it means something to people that have. What is noticeable about Glee though is that it does have a sort of ‘cable series shine’ to it despite the fact it’s on FOX. The show looks great, unlike say The Unusuals which looked like trash.

The show covers a lot of clichéd ground – a lot of it – the jock who joins the musical for example has been done in everything from Popular to American Pie to High School Musical. (It turns out that Ryan Murphy, the creator, also created Popular so maybe he just has a thing for quarterbacks turned singers.) There’s the over the top desperate to be a star girl, again a character we’ve seen before. Heck the group of kids is filled with a gay guy, a sassy black girl, a wheel chair guy. BUT: they feel different. They don’t feel like somebody has just gone around with a cookie cutter popping out stereotypes.

Lea Michele plays the over the top girl and she’s great. She lends a kind of creepy desperation and loneliness to the part that you don’t see a lot on television. In fact you don’t see a show like this a lot on television. The teachers didn’t click with me as much as the students, but you get the feeling as the show goes on it’s going to explore each and every one of these misfit characters a little bit more. It’s hard to explain but you know when you feel a show actually CARES about its characters? Yeah, you get that feeling with Glee.

It’s not FANTASTIC but it is fun, and it’s well written, and it’s well acted and hell, I’ll just come right out and say it: They perform a big musical number to Don’t Stop Believin’ by Journey. It’s the single greatest song of all time. And for me: that was enough for me to go “yep, I’ll be seeing you next season Glee.”

Good, Average, Bad or Ugly?
Good.