Television Yak

Glee finally got around to turning its condescending after-school special tone to two issues that affect everybody: Rachel’s hideous proboscis monkey nose and Asian Tina’s general Asian countenance. Rachel and Tina need to learn that it’s not what’s outside that counts, it’s what’s inside, even at McKinley High School for Gross Teenage Stereotypes. It’s not merely that the moral of the story is inane, even for Glee, and even for the guy who spent six years chopping up beautiful people on Nip/Tuck — but Murphy, et al. are so desperate to cram self-acceptance down our throats that they need to create this insane fun-house world that undercuts the entire message. These are the episodes where everyone insists Rachel is a fat fucking cow, because apparently the writers forgot that the medium is television and we can actually see Lea Michele, and no matter what anachronistic mental hygiene film daughter outfit wardrobe puts her in, every boy in the school except Kurt and Karofsky would totally hit that. Hell, even Kurt’s gay boyfriend whose name I can’t recall tapped that ass.

Tina, who the writers have finally remembered exists, also pulls some kind of body dysmorphic disorder out of her ass, suddenly bothered by the fact that there are no Asian sex symbols, and she decides to look more white. Even though she has a boyfriend who obviously is into her the way she is. But if you rewind a little bit, you’ll notice that Tina lives in a world where there are no guys anywhere, not even the half a billion in China, who want to get with a hot Asian chick — or for the more cynical among us, there’s no one who’s tried to monetize that. I don’t care that these characters sometimes shift into a reality where you can bust out in song and a whole orchestra follows you around, and I like that the show centers on a group of misfits, but I think Ryan Murphy is as misguidedly condescending as every guidance counselor I’ve ever had when he says, “You should learn to be happy with who you are — and you could do that too, if you lived in a bizarro world where homely freaks appear on the cover of GQ magazine.”

To be fair, on that cover, Lea Michele does look like she’s trying a lot harder than Dianna Agron is.

But no one cares about Tina, and Rachel and Rachel’s issues dominated the episode as usual. The scene with Rachel and Quinn in the plastic surgeon’s waiting room, where Rachel asks Quinn what it’s like being attractive reminded me of the brilliant seven minutes in heaven scene from Freaks and Geeks:

It’s been more than a decade since Freaks and Geeks died, but next to this scene, Rachel asking Quinn what it’s like to be attractive is cheap and disposable. Rachel has none of Bill’s vulnerability and she’s hardly the underdog — she’s a diva. What makes the Freaks and Geeks scene work is the sense that if Bill looked different, his life would be different. His peers might seek out his sense of humor or his stories, and his misadventures on the show wouldn’t be failed forays into adulthood but fun moments of re-capturing his childhood. Rachel just wants Finn to like her again.

Finn, of course, didn’t dump Rachel because of her looks. He dumped her because she’s a shrill, self-absorbed insufferable bitch carrying an aura of entitlement, someone who’s always demanding the spotlight and then, ironically, complaining that the light makes all of her imperfections glare. Her outer beauty obscures her utter lack of inner beauty, which she’s more than happy to put on gross display.

Glee is usually pretty frickin’ retarded, but it’s a fun retarded. You get an arbitrary mash-up of bouncy pop song-and-dance, a few decent cabaret-style jokes, and on occasion, the show will even pull some genuine pathos out of its ass. And that’s usually enough for me to sit through Mercades’ weekly bullshit about how some forgettable Lady Gaga song gave her the strength to realize she’s beautiful, not just on the inside, but on the outside too. But this episode was dumber than a roofied Brittany S. Pierce at a Mensa meeting, so dumb that I found myself asking questions like, “Why’s Uncle Jesse lecturing dental hygiene to the glee club?” So dumb that I found myself asking questions like, “So, Artie does realize that joining the football team doesn’t magically give him a six-pack, right?” while Lea Michele is doing a shot-for-shot remake of the “Baby One More Time” video!

It was 1998 all over again, Total Request Live, and I bet sooner rather than later, there’ll be a flashback with Will’s audition video for TRL and we learn he wasn’t ingratiating enough and lost out to Carson Daly.

I laughed, however, all despite this episode being a total waste of space and time and an audience that should’ve been watching Lone Star. As much as I loathe Britney, I love Brittany, and her verbal spew and monotone got more face time this episode than ever. Brittany is the glee club’s Ralph Wiggum, only hotter in a cheerleading uniform, and the clueless blather she’s not even aware she’s saying is the show’s only break from the constant emoting and melodrama and Sue Sylvester’s mean-spirited apoplexy. Heather Morris is the most underrated actor on Glee, and the second-most under-appreciated (after that Asian guy who went twenty episodes or so without a single line or a name), so I’m not complaining that she got a showcase tonight, even if the story getting there was moronic and her lip-synching didn’t quite match up to the music.

I would totally watch a show that’s just Morris in front of a brick wall, and she and the ghost of Mitch Hedberg just trade non-sequitors for half an hour. But no, instead we get a neutered Shit My Dad Says, so thanks a lot, TV!