It certainly has its flaws – but this all-singing, all-dancing story of the outcast members of a high-school glee club is still a brilliantly funny and complex comedy
For a while, US high school dramas seemed to have forgotten about losers. Shows celebrating misfits – My So-Called Life, Buffy, Freaks and Geeks– had given way to an ultra-shiny wave of aspirational gloss: The OC, 90210 and Gossip Girl. Then came Glee, about the outcast members of a high school glee club. Its creator, Ryan Murphy, had attempted a dark teen comedy before, the underrated Popular, but this time he managed to take things mainstream by giving his cast showtunes and a seemingly inexhaustible supply of issues, from the bizarre (Brittany thinks her cat, Lord Tubbington, reads her diary) to the hysterical (Quinn gives her baby away, then tries to steal it back).
Glee's underdogs – the nerdy, the gay, the awkward, the bullied – were shoved to the front; the fact that they were all impossibly beautiful and appeared to be pushing 30 didn't hurt either, but then the show always relied on a touch of the surreal.
Glee's rapid ascent to cultural flashpoint, a journey that took it from darkly amusing comedy drama to ubiquitous entertainment industry fare, makes it easy to lose sight of the show itself, which was, for a time, very funny and expertly done. In its first season, it was saved from mawkishness by the school's cheerleader coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch). She moonlights as a rightwing chatshow host, decides wheelchair ramps are "lazy-makers" and calls black students "Aretha" and "Shaft". The kids may have been learning life lessons through song, reappropriating hits to offer advice on teen pregnancy, sexuality, bullying, racism – but, thanks to that cutting humour, Glee rarely felt too adolescent for adults to enjoy. Sue was the monstrous, much-needed antidote to all that sugary sentimentality.
This changed a short way into the second series, when Sue was given a heart and plots became unfocused means of driving the drama towards exploring issues rather than developing characters. It started to feel patronising, offering heavy-handed lessons about why things like drinking and homophobic bullying were bad. There were, however, moments of greatness – Gwyneth Paltrow made a surprisingly fine appearance as a Spanish teacher – but it felt like a show that needed a firm guiding hand.
It didn't appear. If series two was second album syndrome, the third was Be Here Now, a sloppy mess riding on former glories, still banging on about Finn and Rachel, the least appealing fictional couple since Friends tried to make Joey and Rachel a thing. Still, it's worth bearing in mind that this is one of the most diverse shows on mainstream TV – and the Prom episode delivered an almighty emotional wallop, as a Carrie-style joke vote saw Kurt crowned Prom Queen.
Reports on the fourth series, currently airing in the US, suggest that, with the graduation of most of the cast and their move away from school, the show has pulled its socks up. I'm glad. Despite its flaws, Glee is an important show with a solid legacy. As Gossip Girl finally hangs up its designer gladrags and calls it a day, it's good to see the all-singing, all-dancing underdogs thriving once again.
