'Glee' review - Sepinwall on TV

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on May 18, 2009 at 5:17 AM, updated May 18, 2009 at 5:21 AM
Fox's "Glee" debuts tomorrow night after "American Idol."
Auditions don't get much more high-profile, nor the wait for a callback as long, as what Fox is doing with "Glee," a new musical comedy series about the outcast members of an Ohio high school glee club. "Glee" gets to debut tomorrow night after the season's final "American Idol" performance show, and then ... it goes away for months before returning in the fall in a time slot to be announced later today at Fox's upfront fall schedule announcement.

It's a high-risk, potentially high-reward, scheduling plan, one that's going to depend on word of mouth, as well as online downloads and streaming to try to turn this into a network version of "High School Musical" and build big buzz for the show's return in the fall. Maybe people care enough to come back four months from now after only one airing, or maybe they forget the show exists at all once it's away from the post-"Idol" cocoon.

But it would help, I think, if this audition for "Glee" weren't so sweaty and desperate to impress. Maybe there's a good show here, but the opener is trying way too hard just to make an impression.

Then again, that's generally the MO of "Glee" creator Ryan Murphy. With both "Nip/Tuck" and his short-lived high school soap/parody "Popular," Murphy's first -- and often only -- goal has been to get your attention by any means necessary. If there happens to be actual characterization and themes mixed in with the "wowza" moments, that's swell, but they also can seem like accidents.

"Glee" stars Broadway veteran Matthew Morrison as Will Schuester, a high school Spanish teacher who tries to recapture his teenage glory days by signing on as the head of the school glee club.

No one understands why he does it -- not the principal (Iqbal Theba), who'd rather rent out the auditorium for local AA meetings; not his wife Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig), who wants him to become an accountant so he can better support her expensive craft-building habit; and not Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch), the domineering coach of the school's nationally ranked cheerleading squad, who tells Will that in the caste system that is high school, the glee club is at the very bottom.

"Let your little glee kids have their club," Sue tells him, "but don't let any of them pretend they're something they're not."

Though the group Will assembles includes a popular jock (Cory Monteith) with a surprisingly good singing voice, the rest of the crew is more motley than the show's obvious "High School Musical" inspiration. There's wheelchair-bound Arty (Kevin McHale), flamboyant and style-conscious (he asks the bullies to let him take off his Marc Jacobs jacket before they toss him in a Dumpster) Kurt (Chris Colfer), diva Mercedes (Amber Riley) and Tina (Jenna Ushkowitz), who auditions with an overly dramatic and sincere rendition of Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl."

And then there's Rachel Berry, played by another Broadway alum in Lea Michele (from "Spring Awakening"). Rachel is pretty, but not enough that she doesn't come under constant taunting from the cheerleaders. ("Getting ready for the tranny prom?" one asks her.) She's incredibly talented, but so pushy about letting people know it -- "I won my first dance competition when I was 3 months old!" she boasts when someone tries to question her choreography skills -- that she doesn't have any friends.

In the early going, Murphy is using Rachel as his mouthpiece for his thoughts on the state of the American teenager, giving her lines such as, "Nowadays, being anonymous is worse than being poor. Fame is the most important thing in our culture now."

The pilot is packed with musical numbers that are intended to be as vocally impressive as they are funny, but the jokes tend to wear thin quickly -- particularly if you've seen snippets of the songs in Fox's nonstop promos for "Glee" over the past month. (And if you somehow haven't and are interested in the show, you may want to stop reading right about now.)

It's momentarily jaw-dropping when Will takes the club to check out a concert with the state champs, and the rival club launches into an elaborate choral version of Amy Winehouse's "Rehab," but then the song keeps going ... and going. A climactic performance of Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" holds up better over its running time, but it also feels like too much progress too soon for what's supposed to be a rise-of-the-underdog story -- as if Fox needed Murphy to give them a blatant feel-good moment for the promos and to hook the audience for this long break between episode one and episode two.

I don't feel hooked yet -- and likely won't -- based on my feelings about Ryan's track record. But I'm really curious to see how this scheduling works out.

"Glee" (Tomorrow at 9 p.m. on Channel 5) A high school Spanish teacher (Matthew Morrison) takes over the glee club in a new musical comedy series from "Nip/Tuck" creator Ryan Murphy.
