Loser Like Me: Revisiting "Glee"

I don’t know whether to blame the on-going pandemic or what, but I recently did something that I definitely did not see coming: I started rewatching Glee. If you were old enough to watch this popular tv show of a high school show choir ten years ago or so, you most likely had some kind of an opinion on it - whether you actually did watch it yourself or not. It got love, it got hate, it got ridicule and it got praise. I confess that I was a total and absolute “gleek” at the time. I loved Glee to embarrassing lengths and I mean all of it: the show, the actors and the music. To my utter surprise I have now found that I still love the show just as much as I did when I first started watching it a decade ago. 

I have occasionally felt tempted to watch Glee again after the show ended six years ago, but haven’t been able to bring myself to do it. The sudden deaths of three of the actors, one during the time when Glee was still being filmed, have made it hard for me to get back to it since the actors were such an essential part of the whole phenomenon. Particularly the case of Mark Salling has turned me off, leaving me feel like it would be simply wrong or at least far too awkward to see him on screen. This autumn, however, I ended up giving Glee a chance and somehow managed to ignore the fates of the actors and just focus on the story. And man am I glad I did. 

I have fallen in love with Glee all over again. There’s even a new layer to this love today as I’m watching the show from the point of view of a very different person from who I was ten years ago. At the time, I related to the teen characters, being fairly fresh out of high school myself, while today I have more of a grown-up view. For the most part, however, the things I love (and hate) about the show have stayed the exact same and I want to share these things with you - whether you are a fan yourself or possibly someone who just wants to understand what the hype was about!

(Warning: major spoilers of the plotline of Glee from this point onwards)

The ragtag-bunch-of-misfits trope works 

The premise of Glee is that the main characters are a group of high school misfits who just can’t seem to win (Kurt being a gay kid in a homopohobic school, Artie being a nerdy guy in a wheelchair wearing classes, Tina starting off as a shy, stuttering Asian girl etc.). Anyone who has ever felt like an outsider or misunderstood can relate to the underdog trope and find comfort in seeing the mistreated characters start looking out for one another. Watching the show ten years ago, I could easily recall the times I had been bullied as a teenager myself and empathize with the characters. Today, I watch the scenes of Kurt being pushed against lockers or Unique/Wade facing transphobic comments in horror (think of the Simpsons lady going “Won't somebody please think of the children!" but like a 30-year-old worrying about the well-being of LGBT kids), and it’s an important kind of horror to feel.

I think the underdog trope was particularly well handled in the first two seasons where the show managed to be at the same time uplifting and yet so cruel. An example of this is the episode “Mattress” where school pictures are taken and the glee club fights to not get theirs into the yearbook in fear that it will just get defaced by other students. In the end, the previously popular girl Quinn changes her mind after realizing how much the glee club’s genuine support means to her, and she manages to get the club a whole page in the yearbook for their picture. If the episode had ended with that, it would have been fairly touching and admittedly corny. But what actually happens is that once the yearbook is published we see the school bullies defacing the photo and laughing their asses off. It feels genuinely horrible after all the shit we’ve seen the main characters go through and makes the ending work really well.

Of course underdogs also need wins. In the first two seasons, the New Directions ultimately lose their show choir competitions - again with that great combination of touching and cruel writing - but at the end of the third season they finally win the Nationals. And it does feel good to the viewer rather than corny. While rewatching the show, I actually didn’t even remember if the New Directions won the competition or not and it came as a pleasant surprise when they did. After the first two seasons, Glee softened quite a lot, which is a bit disappointing to me, but then again the show had to evolve or it would have gotten stale. 

The soundtracks have some total bangers

You can’t talk about Glee without talking about the music. I know there used to be a lot of jokes about the song covers (and us fans would joke about them too), but obviously music is very essential to the show. The actors are good singers and the performances are either fun or touching, depending on the scene. There were also a lot of interesting interpretations such as the more or less iconic mash-ups they did or covers that otherwise greatly differed from the original songs. Not all of them are great versions or great choices for the particular story moments, but for the most part the performances are very enjoyable and for a musical fan like me, they really make the show.

I’ll confess that I’ve been listening to the Glee soundtracks a lot during this rewatch. It’s just so much fun listening to the songs and recalling the scenes from the show! I get cheered up by funny moments like angry Rachel singing “Gives You Hell” when the assignment of the week was songs with the word “hello” in their title, or triumphant moments like New Directions winning the Regionals with original songs “Get It Right” and “Loser Like Me”. Then there are the beautiful moments like Kurt returning to McKinley High after his transfer to Dalton Academy and singing “As if We Never Said Goodbye”, and then sad moments like the girls of New Directions singing “Shake It Out” to coach Beiste who is lying to them about having left her abusive husband (don’t worry, she does leave him eventually). The fact that the music is so tightly tied to the story gives the songs whole new meanings.

Representation matters

Many remember Glee particularly from the amount of LGBT representation on it. It got hate from homophobes and love from LGBT people and allies. Diversity in general was a crucial part of the show and one reason why I love it so much. We have gay and lesbian characters, transgender characters, characters of colour, disabled characters etc. The diversity might feel a bit forced especially later on in the show, but in the first seasons it worked pretty effortlessly. And honestly I feel that by the later seasons Glee had acquired a status where it would have been wrong for it to not do more with the diversity even at the risk of getting a bit preachy. 

At the time when Glee originally aired, there had already been a fair amount of LGBT representation on tv, but it was mostly focused on adults like in Will & Grace so it was great seeing teenaged gay characters like Kurt or lesbians like Santana. It meant a lot to young LGBT viewers to see Kurt and Blaine and Santana and Brittany kiss on screen, dance together, sing love songs to one another and so on. I also think it’s important that there was talk about sex between two men and two women since even today it seems to be such a big taboo and I assume it’s still not discussed enough in sex ed classes in schools, for instance. 

The fact that Glee has characters like Artie in a wheelchair and Becky with her Down syndrome was pioneering and sadly even today it seems like a radical choice. I can’t even think of another mainstream representation of Down syndrome on television aside from American Horror Story - a show incidentally made by the Glee creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk. As for Artie’s wheelchair, I love it how neither the characters nor the makers of the show ever took an easy way out with it. For example in the song performances, Artie is always as much of a part of the show as the rest of the kids and there’s always choreography for him as well.

Emotional rollercoasters are fun

I’ve mentioned already that the writing of Glee is often very touching and so it is. I feel like the different points I’ve raised so far all contribute to the best - and the most poignant - moments on the show. For example, there’s a scene in the third season episode “On My Way” where Dave Karofsky - a closeted football player who used to bully Kurt for being gay - attempts suicide after being outed at his new school. I vividly remember how shocked I was when I first saw that episode. The scene is done really well: we have cut scenes of Blaine practicing “Cough Syrup” by Young the Giant and of Dave finding out he’s been outed at school; the very thing that he has feared the most. We go back and forth between Blaine’s performance and Dave crying in his room where he eventually tries to hang himself. It’s a very well crafted scene that’s heartbreaking enough to make you feel it physically in your body.

Then the Glee scripts have this certain bittersweetness that appeals to me personally more than endings that are “too happy”. The one scene that never fails to make me cry is not of Dave’s suicide attempt but the one of Kurt talking with him afterwards in a hospital. Kurt asks Dave to imagine his future, and Dave gets more and more excited about it as Kurt paints a picture of him having a job of his dreams, a husband and a child:

KURT: Your handsome partner comes to visit you in your office and brings along your son. You’re taking the rest of the day off work because you’re taking your son to his first football game. You lean over to your partner and you say-
DAVE: “I’m so happy right now.”

It just gets me every time. There’s so much hope there after the hopelessness we saw earlier in the episode. And the impact of both scenes is so much stronger when we’ve seen the journey Dave’s taken to get there. He starts off as just a jerk in the first season and then in the second we find that this homophobic bully is secretly gay himself. By third season we sympathise with him and so the suicide attempt and the hopeful yet bittersweet ending of the episode are very powerful moments. Perfect for people like me who enjoy stories that make you emotional.

Nothing is perfect… but that’s ok

Glee is not without its problems, of course. A big issue for me is the fact that even though the actors were adults, the characters are underage in the first seasons and yet especially the girls are extremely sexualized. Sure, Heather Morris performing songs like “I'm a Slave 4 U” is hot as hell, but the character is like 16 or 17 in that scene which makes it disturbing to watch. Then there are just a lot of bad choices made in the scripts. The first half of the first season for example is hard to watch because of the glee club teacher Will Schuester’s wife (an antagonist so horrible you can’t even love to hate them) and the insane fake baby plotline (seriously, who thought of that?). I also think that the first two seasons focus way too much on the adult characters when it’s the kids who are the most interesting. Then during and after the third season the overall quality started to decrease. I even stopped watching the show at some point, but got back to it for the final season. 

How I wish I could combine the freshness of the first season, the cohesiveness and steady quality of the second and the focus on the student characters of the third together into one perfect season of Glee… But since I can’t do that, I’ll just continue my rewatch and appreciate what we got: a witty yet very touching show about being an outsider with a diverse cast plus some awesome musical performances. Glee is not the best tv show ever written, but it will always have a very special place in my heart and this rewatching project has convinced me it’s not just nostalgia talking. There really was something special about this series.