Jun 7, 2012

[TV] Glee: Season 3


The third season of the hit show Glee may be the last one I'll ever watch. I've been struggling to stay interested in the show ever since the plot lines started to get crazier and crazier come Season 2, and not in a Community is Meta Cool kind of way either. Thus by this third season my sense of interest was just hanging by a thread and the show didn't do much to help me in this regard.

It's just as well though - this season had a lot of the "seniors" finally graduating, thus paving the way for other characters to take up he reins. Of course many bloggers out there have postulated that just because the characters have graduated doesn't mean we're not going to stop following them around. Now that feels like a lousy plan for me since it'll mean more and more characters muddying the waters to the detriment of everyone involved.

But that's always been a problem of this show, one that it clearly does not want to leave behind just yet.

Synopsis: Glee is a Fox musical comedy-drama television series co-created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. This particular season ran for a total of 22 episodes.

The season began with the big reminder that a lot of the Glee Club members are going to graduate at the end of the year and thus the need for them to figure out their college plans, spruce up their resumes with key extracurricular activities and all that good stuff. Cue strange character motivations for the rest of the season.

Rachel (Lea Michele) and Kurt (Chris Cofler) are determined to get into the New York Academy of the Dramatic Arts (NYADA). Thus this includes efforts to have leading roles in the school production of West Side Story and running for the position of senior class president - along with Brittany (Heather Morris). The other sort of just mill around worrying about short term problems.

English: Harry Shum, Jr. as Mike Chang perform...
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Other twists of the season include the return of Rachel's mom Shelby Corcoran (Idina Menzel) who is tasked to set up a rival glee club eventually named The Troubletones, Mike Chang (Harry Shum, Jr.) finally getting a storyline about the highly stereotypical concepts around Asian family expectations in school and Sam Evans (Chord Overstreet) returning to school.

But the season also included even more character including the co-winners of The Glee Project - Samuel Larsen and Damian McGinty who play Joe Hart and Rory Flanagan respectively, the financier behind the Troubletones, Sugar Motta (Vanessa Lengies). Oh, and Kurt's boyfriend Blayne (Darren Criss) is now studying at McKinley as well.

This is not to say the season was not without it's unique moments. I'll most love how Becky Johnson (Lauren Potter) has become a fully fleshed-out character over the years and the fact that she imagines that she sounds like Helen Mirren in her head as first experienced in the episode Yes/No. I also totally loved the gender bender sequence in Props, although it's a major shame that they didn't carry things through until the end.

Now this season suffered from a lot of character bloat and thus it was hard to maintain good quality story-writing. The war for attention between the seniors and the underclassmen (at least from a writing perspective) really presented a weird dichotomy between the characters, one that wasn't quite as bad as all the adult-related story lines in general. Please, can we stop giving them stories?

At least the season didn't have too many weird music-dominated episodes apart from the obligatory tributes to Michael Jackson and Whitney Houston. But on the flip side, the music wasn't all that great apart from a few choice numbers like the Rumour Has It/Someone Like You mash-up by Santana (Naya Rivera) and perhaps the dancing involved in Brittany's Run the World (Girls) campaign performance.

I really could have done without the Glee Project winners and I shudder to consider that they're going to try the same gimmick again for the next season.

For now, I think I can safely leave the world of Glee behind given how the show wraps up by allowing them to finally achieve their big goal. And that's not even a spoiler, anyone with half a brain would realize that the season could not have progressed to allow the seniors to graduate without giving them that victory. Thus this third season of Glee gets 2 increasingly blatant gay moments on the show out of a possible 5.




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2 comments:

  1. No reaction on the gay-bullying episode?
     

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  2. The gay-bullying episode was a Season 2 story arc and not one that I appreciated all that much. My main issue with it was the fact that Kurt's ultimate resolution was to transfer schools entirely instead of somehow coming to a resolution involving facing his tormentor.

    And no, the whole the homophobic bully is also gay himself was not a surprise twist angle either, hehe

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