Glee - Revenge of the Nerds

 

Back in the day, I loved the show Square Pegs, which brilliantly highlighted the anxiety of two high school girls trying to fit in.  To my delight, I’ve recently found a 21^st Century replacement, Glee (FOX).  This show interweaves serious high school issues (teen pregnancy, discrimination) with comical coming-of-age dilemmas (dating, self-image), and throws musical theater and the attendant ensemble cast into the mix.  I know what you’re thinking.  Stay with me here.

Glee follows the lives of the misfits who make up a show choir/glee club in an Ohio high school and the obligatory comical adults around them.  The kids are led by coach William Schuster (“Mr. Shoe”), who is also the school’s Spanish teacher and is prone to spending too much of his teacher’s salary on hair products.   While the club works toward getting to the show choir sectionals competition, it battles its own internal demons – there’s the pregnant girl with both the real father and the guy who thinks he’s the father in the club, the gay male soprano who wants to sing “I Honestly Love You” to one of the straight male football players in the club, the girl with two daddies who doesn’t want to share the spotlight with the other kids, and the lovable and pitiable wheelchair-bound kid who can’t get to sectionals without a special bus with a wheelchair lift that the school won’t pay for.  Externally, the club has to contend with their #1 Hater, cheerleading (“Cheerios”) coach Sue Sylvester, a win-at-all-costs type of ambiguous sexuality who wants nothing more than to see the glee club disbanded in order to have their funding, however meager, redirected to the Cheerios budget. 

The story lines in Glee are enough to make the writers of Days of Our Lives blush – in one of the more outrageous plots, Mr. Shoe’s wife pretends to be pregnant, going so far as to wear a belly pad to deceive him, because she’s become neurotic that Shoe will leave her.  No baby at the end of nine months?  No problem!  She’s made a secret deal with pregnant Cheerio/glee club member Quinn to take her baby off her hands. Nope, this won’t be a trainwreck at all.

Despite the high level of camp, I forgive the writers of Glee everything.  Somehow, it works.  This show is laugh-out-loud, singalong fun.  The best moments of every episode I’ve viewed have been the club’s performances of pop music and show tunes we all know and love.  The wheelchair dancing to “Proud Mary,” the first episode’s “Don’t Stop Believing,” the rival choir’s hairography to “Bootylicious.” I loved them all.

Glee returns to FOX’s lineup April 13.  In the meantime, I’ll be downloading the soundtrack from iTunes and humming along.