Glee

OK, actually, I should qualify that — the middle section was brilliant. The wraparound stuff was the “Glee” usual: silly, pandering and dull. During the final number — “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” set in a soup kitchen that no doubt was populated by the children of “Glee” cast and crew — even the actors seemed bored, except for Jane Lynch, whose Coach Sylvester was acknowledging the first anniversary of her sister’s death. (Tear cup.) But OH MY GOD IF YOU COULD HAVE SEEN THAT MIDDLE SECTION, DIARY! Presented in black-and-white, it perfectly re-created the set, the tone and even the camera moves of “The Judy Garland Show” Christmas special from 1963, but with a cultural flash forward/flashback quality, presenting a patchwork quilt vision of America that wouldn’t have gotten past the network censors four decades ago.

Artie conceived the special to fill unexpectedly vacant airtime on the local PBS affiliate. Lovers Kurt and Blaine, devoted Friends of Judy, hosted an homage to the broadcast that they no doubt would have watched in awe had they been a couple (closeted, surely) in early-1960s Lima, Ohio. Early in the episode proper, there were ostentatious references to 1978′s legendarily awful “Star Wars Holiday Special,” but in the PBS special, that reference was reduced to Finn and Puck dropping by in Luke Skywalker and Han Solo costumes and performing a Springsteen-y version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” The rest of the special was Judy, Judy, Judy. The filmmaking was vintage 1963, letting action play out in waist-up medium shots and head-to-toe long shots with a minimum of cutting. “Glee” even replicated the old-fashioned network TV special conceit of pretending that the unseen viewer was a party guest (“Well, hello! … Come on in!”). I love that certain McKinley High performers were incredibly smooth on camera, while others glanced nervously at the lens. And the staging of Kurt and Blaine’s “Let It Snow” was a delight.

Set, according to Artie, in the Swiss Alps village of Gstaad, there was a kind of alternate-universe feeling to the whole production, as if it were unfolding not on a public-TV soundstage in Lima but in a blandly benevolent dream space — one in which the characters all got along fantastically well and never cut each other down in public or stole each other’s boyfriends and girlfriends, and one in which it was possible to call Christmas “Christmas” rather than “the holidays” without seeming exclusionary. Herbie the Elf — sorry, Rory the Irish exchange student — even invoked “A Charlie Brown Christmas” by reciting from the New Testament, Linus-style. (“Lights, please.”) During a season in which “Glee” feels even more slapped-together than it already did, this charming interlude was a reminder of what the show can do when it puts its mind to it.

But as my tombstone will one day read, I digress. Sue was absent this hour, which was imaginatively titled “The First Time,” and that was a good thing for her as well as us. As written by Bradley Buecker and directed by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa Robe (deep breath), this episode was stuffed to bursting. None of the characters — even theoretically important ones — got much time to shine, or even behave like plausible humans. It was an end-of-innocence roundelay, with a capper to Mike’s “Asian F” story line awkwardly shoehorned in. (Really, “Glee”? You actually wrote and aired an “I have no son!” scene?)

After threatening to devirginize many of its major characters eons ago, “Glee” pretty much had to get down to business tonight, but that didn’t stop it from teasing the audience with false carnal starts. Finn wisely rejected Rachel’s advances when it became clear she only wanted to sleep with him so that she could better understand the sexual awakening of Maria in “West Side Story.” (Like it’s better to let yourself be deflowered because your boyfriend is depressed? What a piece of work is Rachel.) Kurt rightly rejected Blaine’s plea to be “spontaneous” in the parking lot of Lima’s only gay bar after Blaine spent most of the night flirting with a devilishly handsome Dalton student named Sebastian, who has been to Paris and had anonymous sex at a nightclub once. Why is Blaine, an emblem of young Midwestern gay male confidence last season, playing hard-to-get with Kurt this year and acting awestruck by poseurs like Sebastian? Because it’s “Glee,” where characters become whatever the plot requires them to be, consistency be damned.

The decision to tactically delay all nooky until the final montage — effectively blue-balling the viewers — was the only aspect of this episode that could be called clever, but only if we mutually agree that “clever” is a synonym for “not totally lame,” which the rest of the hour surely was. This otherwise verbally frank and sometimes physically raunchy series turned weirdly chaste in its final minutes, showcasing its newly coupled pairs post-coitus, fully clothed and gazing dolefully into each others’ eyes like 19th century Amish settlers after a long night of bundling.

Coach Beiste and Finn each had unexpectedly strong, tearful moments in which they admitted their deepest fears — respectively, Coach’s belief in her unattractiveness, and Finn’s fear of being mediocre for the rest of his life. Finn and Rachel and Kurt and Blaine got do do the horizontal bop at the end (though not all together, alas). We didn’t find out if Coach actually got it on with a good-looking recruiter named Cooter, but he did convince her to dress up in lady clothes and go on a date with him — a date that presumably included attending the glee club’s performance of “West Side Story.”  (There was once a recruiter named Cooter/Who fancied himself Coach Beiste’s suitor/He plied her with roses/And charm, one supposes/And proved he knew how to salute her.) Digression!

I was moved by the big numbers for reasons that have little to do with the numbers themselves.  I love “West Side Story.” I’m inclined to support any staunchly gay-friendly prime-time musical fantasy on general principle, especially one that believes in the arts as a great unifier — a sentiment that cuts through the prime-time gloom like a ray of light even when individual episodes reek. And this one was pretty fragrant. Naya Rivera’s Santana isn’t the world’s greatest singer, but she killed as Anita, and Artie’s choreography seemed atypically restrained and classy for “Glee”; but I wouldn’t swear to either statement because the auto-tuning and fast cutting make all praise for talent suspect. For the most part, “The First Time” amounted to one poor judgment call after another. This episode amounted to a gross misuse of a great musical, an American classic whose thematic richness could have been mined in far more direct and organic ways. In comparison, that atrocious “Rocky Horror” episode was a misdemeanor. I have to assume Stephen Sondheim didn’t see this installment; if he had, we would have heard about it by now, because the combination of bad singing, bad dancing and horribly forced juxtapositions of “West Side Story” numbers and “Glee” moments would have set him straight to the nearest emergency room, where doctors would have labored furiously to un-stick the eyeballs that had rolled back into his skull.

And the fireplace. The fireplace! Have none of the writers seen “Top Secret!,” which features the greatest fireplace “discretion shot” of all time? Or maybe they have seen it, and this is their way of reclaiming the fireplace shot and making it pure again? Were we seeing a bold attempt to revirginize a visual cliche that Hollywood has tricked out to the point of exhaustion? Or is it, as a friend suggested, a harbinger of STDs to come? My internal monologue belts like Rita Moreno: Forget this show and find another.

It’s a new school year. All the familiar faces are back, except for sinewy blond Sam Evans, who was last seen threatening to add some much-needed pep to the series by dating the plus-size African-American Mercedes. In a throwaway bit, we learn that Sam “moved away” over the summer, and now Mercedes has a plus-size African-American boyfriend. (Too bad; a relationship between Sam and Mercedes would have been groundbreaking for all sorts of reasons.) Will Schuester is back to teaching music at McKinley High after giving up on his dream of being a Broadway star (the fellow who replaced him won a Tony) and is trying to recruit new glee club members via the Purple Piano Project. The latter places a bunch of donated upright pianos (painted by Will) throughout the school, the better to encourage the teens to show off their talent by bursting into song. (They needed so much help doing that. Good going, Will!)

The daughter of the rich guy who donated the pianos shows up to audition for glee club. She’s awful. She’s also an entitled little snot who thinks she can say the most hateful things without fear of retribution because she’s been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome. She’s a great character, and I hope we haven’t seen the last of her.

Most of this episode revolved around Kurt and Rachel fretting over their college prospects and Sue Sylvester running for a death-vacated congressional seat by pledging to introduce legislation that would eliminate arts programs from Ohio public schools. “I thought people wanted a candidate who was for something — that’s why I took that pro-deportation stance,” she says. “But the people are angry. They want a candidate who’s against something.” As always, Sue is plotting to sabotage glee club and prevent the team from making it to nationals. (Coach Beiste tells Will that a win at nationals equals 10 more years of survival for the club, guaranteed.) To thwart Will’s recruitment plan, Sue endorses a sustained campaign of sabotage carried out by three Cheerios. The first incident occurs during a lunchtime performance by Kurt’s boyfriend Blaine, a former prep schooler who’s now a student at McKinley; he performs a bouncy rendition of “It’s Not Unusual” that ends with the purple piano exploding in flame, courtesy of a couple of cups of lighter fluid and a cigarette tossed by Quinn, who has dyed her hair pink and remade herself as a charter member of a heretofore unseen clique, the Skanks.

Also, Will and Emma are apparently, officially together and seriously playing house. Their relationship seems peaceful, loving and mutually supportive. To quote my 14-year-old daughter, “I’m already bored with this relationship.”

If this were the kind of show where one complained about plausibility, I’d gripe about Sue being allowed to keep her job as a local TV commentator while actively running for congress (which under the Equal Time Rule would force her employers to offer free airtime to any rival candidate who requested it), or the idea that the fiery destruction of a piano at a public high school wouldn’t shut the place down and become a national media scandal. But this is not the kind of show where you worry about such things. It’s the kind where Sue can plan to have her cheerleaders fired out of a cannon the size of one of the guns of Navarone without any of the Cheerios squealing, or anyone from the administration or the local media finding out. You just accept the outlandishness as part of the show’s overall aura of cheerful lunacy. “Glee” is set in the “real” world, but it’s essentially a fantasy — not unlike NBC’s “Community,” which is set at a community college but might as well be taking place in a lunar colony owned and operated by the Marx Brothers.

The most important thing is that the series honors its own internal logic — which on “Glee” is almost entirely emotional — and that the various plot threads ultimately lead somewhere interesting. This already looks to be a throw-stuff-against-the-wall-and-see-if-anything-sticks sort of season. But that’s not a deal breaker. Last season was like that, too; so was the abbreviated Season 1. “Glee” is just that kind of show — one that mixes carefully cultivated, often transcendentally beautiful moments with seemingly random bits.

The most intriguing thing about last night’s season premiere was that if you paid attention to the subplots, you saw that showrunners Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan and Brad Falchuk are already thinking about their exit strategy — as well they should, considering high school only lasts four years and these kids aren’t getting any younger.

The most successful and affecting subplot was Rachel and Kurt’s visit to that New York college recruitment event, where they witnessed a staggeringly polished group of fellow Ohioans performing a medley of show tunes and realized not only are they not the best musical theater performers in the country, they’re not even the best in Ohio. “What if we’re not good enough to make it?” Kurt asked Rachel afterward, sitting in her car while a rainstorm cried for both of them. (Such a melodrama, this series!) In the end, of course, they both rallied and resolved to do their best — which in Kurt and Rachel’s case is formidable.

But in the end, the episode’s most intriguing development wasn’t Kurt’s climactic declaration that he’s going to run for student body president (though I’m looking forward to that). It was the revelation that new characters such as the Aspergers’ exploiter and the eccentric, funny, super-talented kids who performed the medley could hold my attention as strongly as the original cast of “Glee.” 

If Murphy, Brennan and Falchuk are clever enough, they could start integrating new freshmen and sophomores into the existing cast, and make them so lively and distinctive that when the founding characters graduate — as they eventually must — we won’t think that “Glee” is overstaying its welcome by continuing to produce new episodes.