Back when I took on the role of Marquee editor and gained access to my own column (read here: soapbox), I promised myself not to just use it to sound off about my favorite individual movies, TV shows, books, etc. However, I made no such promise when I started this online version of Hitting the Marq.
That’s why this week you get to hear how wonderful “Glee” is.
Don’t frantically click away, populace; I’m not your average rabid fanboy. Fact of the matter is, this season of “Glee” has been a major disappointment. Almost all of the episodes in the second season have fallen into two categories: passable plotlines with lousy songs (like “Audition” and “The Substitute”) or lousy songs with a plotline painfully wrapped around them like barbed wire (like the abomination known as “Britney/Brittany”).
But all that changed this week, when nearly back-to-back episodes of “Glee” renewed my faith in the show.
At first glance, they should have been everything I hated: an episode delayed until February to coincide with the Super Bowl — despite the fact that no high school football season I know of extends even remotely that late — and a Valentine’s Day-themed episode.
Except they were good.
“The Sue Sylvester Shuffle” was a logical continuation of the “football kids hate glee club” plotline, and “Silly Love Songs” built off the developments of that episode in a reasonable fashion. It was almost as if the writers of the show were bothering to collaborate with each other, a seemingly obvious concept much of “Glee’s” episodes thus far have failed to achieve.
Making things better is the song choices. At the risk of sounding like a hipster, I think “Glee’s” song choices have been painfully mainstream this season, and uninventively mainstream, at that.
But the Super Bowl episode offered up a range of genres like we haven’t seen in weeks, with an all-men’s choir covering Destiny’s Child and R&B classic “Thriller” getting spliced into indie masterwork “Heads Will Roll.” And while the songs in the V-Day episode weren’t quite as varied, they were performed well enough that it didn’t matter to me.
Then again, maybe this is just a tiny bubble of goodness waiting to be burst, just like how the first season started with two awesome episodes and then moved on to one where Shuester started an a cappella group for washed-up boy band wannabes. After all, they did do Justin Bieber songs this week.
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