There's Nothing Ironic About Show Choir!: The Sentimentality of Glee

Since before its actual airing, I had been hearing buzz about Fox’s Glee becoming the new television sensation. After attempting to watch the pilot, I found myself unimpressed by the show half-way through and gave up, deciding that the show did not live up to its hype. Still, the buzz didn’t die down as the season went on, and I couldn’t help but wonder if the show actually got better after the 25 minutes I had actually watched. So I gave the show another shot and watched the first dozen or so episodes in one sitting. What I found was that the show was much more enjoyable than I had originally assumed. Yet, there was something about the show that still struck me as strange. There seems to be a certain sentimentality to the show that hipster cynics tend to reject unless it is being treated ironically. Yet those same cynics have embraced the show whole heartedly. This raised the question for me: What is the appeal of Glee?

The fact that a musical television show has, to the best of my knowledge, never been attempted before certainly adds a sense of originality to the show. Yet, the show is more than a musical. Glee is a hyper-postmodern collage of musical, sitcom, teen drama and soap opera genres. In traditional postmodern style, the show is brimming with irony, which I would argue is a large part of the show’s appeal. The irony of the show comes in the wholesomeness of the show’s premise being contrasted against clearly unwholesome elements, such as Sue’s abusive treatment of her cheerleading squad, or Terri’s stint as a school nurse where she fed all of the students pseudoephedrine in a misguided attempt to keep them “happy and healthy.” Yet, as Rachel so acutely points out in the pilot episode “There’s nothing ironic about show choir!”

The ironic elements of the series create the illusion that the show is parodying conventions of the genres it incorporates into its pop-culture blender. However, the irony and the sentimentality of the show, while simultaneously present, are kept distinctly separate. Take, for example, the episode “The Power of Madonna.” That the show’s plot was an razor thin premise designed as an excuse to do an episode centered around Madonna was treated with a postmodern self-reflexivity; the show was fully aware of how flimsy this premise was and reveled in the absurdity of it. Yet, the show still fell back on a stock plotline that it did not treat ironically. One plotline of the show involves the male characters collectively treating their female counterparts poorly and putting together a performance for the women as a way of apology. If this plot sounds familiar, it’s possibly because Saved by the Bell did it in 1990 with “Breaking Up is Hard to Undo” and Boy Meets World had the same plotline in 1997 with “Last Tango in Philly.” All of these episodes ended with the men putting on a performance of some sort, and Saved by the Bell’s incarnation of the plot was the only one of these three examples without a musical number.

The following episode, “Home,” features another stock plotline straight out of the sitcom archives. After the events of “The Power of Madonna” land Kurt and Mercedes in the Cheerios, Sue forces Mercedes to lose weight, forcing her to develop an eating disorder. The story of a female character developing an eating disorder for exactly one episode, only to find herself miraculously cured of her affliction by the next episode (which is almost unheard of in the real world of eating disorders) has been so prevalent in sitcoms over the years that examples of it hardly need citing. The episode concludes with Mercedes realizing that she does not need to lose weight, singing the song “Beautiful” at a pep rally to demonstrate her renewed confidence, much to the surprise of her new coach, Sue. If there is irony to be found in this plot, it’s in the fact that Sue, rather than being punished for her abuse of her cheerleaders, is actually rewarded for her behavior when a local reporter mistakenly believes that Mercedes performance was planned by Sue and, thus, gives Sue a glowing write-up in the local newspaper. Still, the lesson that Mercedes learns is a trite one that has been taught to female sitcom characters for several decades and it becomes doubtful that Mercedes will ever show signs of her eating disorder again, which would place her more in line with real life anorexics and bulimics than with the anorexic-for-a-day women of the classic family sitcom.

What I think disarms the otherwise cynical and jaded television viewer is the irony in these episodes—or, to be more accurate, the perceived irony. Because the show goes to such extremes with Sue’s hateful and ignorant remarks, Brittany’s bizarre non sequiturs, and Emma’s comical naiveté and germ phobia, it creates the illusion that these stock plotlines are being parodied. Yet, these extreme elements of the show are kept in separate boxes from the stock plots described above, and the sitcom sentimentality is carried out unironically. My point here is not to suggest that Glee is not a wildly entertaining show. Rather, I’d like to point out that the show is pulling from the very hokey family sitcoms that its otherwise jaded audience would normally reject. Feel free to continue enjoying it, but understand that, in pulling from the clichéd plots of family based sitcoms, the show is not performing satire. The sentimentality is meant to be nothing more than pure sentimentality.