By Mary Beth Gentle
It’s that magical time of year. All that glitters is gold. And for one brief moment in time all shows on the New Fall TV Schedule hold the promise of brilliance. And much like a kid on Christmas morning, I race home from work eager to unwrap each new show. Luckily the new and returning shows are premiering in a staggered schedule so my DVR should be able to keep up.
My favorite new TV show of the fall season so far is Glee, the story of a high school glee club full of underdogs. I can already tell that this musical ‘dramady’ with a heart will be my guilty pleasure. The story lines and cliché characters are nothing we haven’t seen before, but once the music starts to play and the characters burst into song I am a willing and captive audience.
Glee centers around the ever optimistic High School teacher and glee leader, Will Shuester (Matthew Morrison), as he helps a rag tag group of adolescents discover their dreams and at the same time re-discovering his own. The glee club consists of awkward teen misfit, Rachel (Lea Michele), football star Finn (Cory Monteith), wheel chair bound Arty (Kevin Mchale), flamboyant fashion plate Kurt (Chris Colfer) and diva in training Mercedes (Amber Riley) to name a few. Every high school click is covered in the show, even down to the overly perfect cheerleaders out to take down the glee club.
You might think the drama ends there, but most of the drama actually takes place in the teachers lounge. There is the domineering cheerleading coach who refuses to let a dime of the schools budget go to the support of the glee club, there is a testosterone charged football coach and a germ phobic guidance counselor who has a crush on Will. Not to mention the drama that Will encounters on a daily basis with his somewhat shrewish wife who would rather he was in a job that was more upwardly mobile.
From the onset, the pilot is packed with musical numbers that are both impressive and entertaining. And there is enough quirkiness to raise this show above all the other teen-based dramas clogging up the airwaves. In the pilot episode when Will takes the glee club to check out the competition, we quickly understand as do the kids in the club, that it’s going to be a long year with lots of musical numbers if they are going to make it to the State Championships. But, with lines like Rachel’s, “We’re gonna win because we’re different. That’s what makes us special.” She proves that the show has the heart needed to make us care about the characters. And when it comes to TV, new or old, without heart we aren’t going to tune in.
If you have already missed the opening episodes of Glee, you can catch them online at either Fox.com or Hulu.com. And if musical teen dramadies are just not your thing, there are still plenty of new and returning TV shows to tune into in the coming weeks, some of the other new shows that I will be checking out are; Flash Forward, Cougar Town, V, The Good Wife and the Vampire Diaries. And the returning TV shows that I can’t wait to tune back into are; Fringe, Survivor, Ugly Betty and Brothers and Sister to name a few. This is one Hollywood Cube Dweller that has her fall TV schedule all planned out…and here’s hoping that a least a few shows live up to my hope for brilliance.
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