It’s hard to remember now, but there was something wonderfully unhinged about the pilot episode of Glee, Ryan Murphy’s hit Fox sitcom about the show choir at a run-down Ohio high school. By the end of its first season, Glee was already morphing into a treacle-drenched pop-musical dramedy. But when it started out, it was far less feel-good and far spikier. Much like high school itself, the show was filled with weirdly inappropriate jokes and unhinged characters.
With the news last week that there’s a Glee reboot in the works—green-lit by Disney+ and Hulu, written by the original showrunners, and featuring some of the original stars—the creators have a chance to recover Glee’s original offbeat charm.
I remember exactly the moment from the first episode, back in 2009, when I realized what a bizarre piece of work Glee was intended to be. The show’s protagonist is the talented but overbearing Rachel Berry, played by Lea Michele. It would be cruel to say that Michele is typecast, but she certainly brought her own obnoxious, try-hard energy to the role. Already well known to Broadway nerds (myself included) as a star of the runaway hit musical Spring Awakening, Michele was launched to bona fide national celebrity status by her blindingly earnest solos in Glee.
But it wasn’t her singing that pulled me up short in the pilot. It was the scene in which Rachel reports the school’s former choir director, Sandy Ryerson, for groping boys in class. We’ve already seen Sandy, played by Stephen Tobolowsky in a pink-on-pink button-up and cardigan combo, running his hand sensuously down the chest of an intensely uncomfortable soloist. But that’s not really why Rachel shows up at the principal’s office with mascara running down her cheeks to tattle. In truth, she feels she’s been cheated out of a lead performance that belonged to her.
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