Glee – Season 1, Episode 2: “Showmance”

This week: sex, lies, jazz hands, and Salt-n-Pepa. But mostly sex.

Attention, everyone — this show is the real thing. It appeared to be, back in May when Fox aired the pilot episode, which was topped-off full of endearing characters, scabrous wit, and highly unlikely production numbers. (A massive show choir in Ohio singing and dancing to Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab”? IF ONLY.) But one never knows for sure about pilots, and we’ve all been burned before; so I hedged my bets, just a little, heading  into this.

Well, now I’m in. This episode proves that Glee is for real; it explodes off the screen in a way that not a lot of other shows even try to do. Everything’s candy-colored and cutesy, but that doesn’t mean all is well. Witness the opening segment:  Will Shuester, our hero, a nice-guy teacher with a horrid wife and a not-so-secret glee club past, comes driving into the parking lot at school smiling like he just got paid; not even his dragging muffler can keep him down. One by one, all his glee kids greet him in the parking lot: grasping ingenue Rachel, sweet jockish Finn, and three appendices (about which more later). They’re all laughing and jesting and it’s all beautiful and wonderful, right? Then Shuester sees Kurt, the fastidious young gentleman (read: gay as Proust) of the group, hanging out by the dumpster with a bunch of football players. Shuester keeps walking, oblivious to the fact that Kurt is going to take yet another trip INTO the dumpster courtesy of Horrible Jock Nation (about which more later too). I still have whiplash from the sharp transition from happy-happy to resigned despair…but it feels good.

In short order we are introduced to the three women who are making Will’s life an interesting hell. Emma Pillsbury, the delicious OCD school counselor, is trying to arrange a way to connect with him; Sue Sylvester, the evil bizarre cheerleading coach, is afraid of glee club and is trying to kill it; Will’s wife, Terri, is running him into the ground with demands for more money for their incoming baby. Of these three, the best scenes are always with Sue, played by the amazing Jane Lynch — she impugns him, she demands his resignation at every turn, she offers to let him work for her (“launder my soiled delicates” is the phrase of the week), she provides a perfect farcical foil for Matthew Morrison’s overly good good-guy Will. Jayma Mays’ work as Emma is strangely sexy, considering she washes each of her grapes individually with a Handi-Wipe before eating it, and Jessalyn Gilsig is well cast as the former cheerleader Terri, who has meltdowns over whether or not she can order all the most prestigious accoutrements in the house that they cannot afford.

Everyone else has problems this week, too. Rachel (Lea Michele) wants Finn (Cory Monteith), but he is going with ball-busting cheerleader — and top school celibacy advocate — Quinn Fabray (Dianna Agron); Quinn spitting out “Time for some girl-talk, man-hands” to Rachel is my other phrase of the week. And the others … okay, I lied, they don’t really have any problems except that they are clearly background players. Mercedes see-saws back and forth between ghetto princess and supportive team member; the wheelchair dude is in a wheelchair; the Jewish-Asian maybe-lesbian girl pushes the wheelchair dude around; Kurt gets into a fashion argument with Mercedes. I know they will develop these characters in the weeks to come, but I fear they will never get as far as actually making them interesting. WE SHALL SEE.

Main focus this week is sex and its discontents. Will is regretting knocking up his selfish wife, leading to a ham-fisted but hilarious glee rendition of “Golddigger” wherein Will takes the Kanye part flawlessly, cut back and forth with Terri ordering more house stuff. Emma advises Rachel to take an interest in Finn’s life, cut back and forth with her own poor relationship history (crying in her car to Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” = A+++++!). Quinn fears Finn’s involvement with glee club means he’s gay, or that he will seem gay to others, or that Rachel will snap him up and have her free-lovin’ ways with him — Rachel is emphatically NOT a member of Celibacy Club, as she makes clear in high style. It’s SEX MADNESS, baby!

But it’s really, of course, all about desire. Will and Emma know they should really be together, but they won’t let themselves cheat. That doesn’t stop their scene late at night in the school from being incredibly sexy, especially when Will smudges her nose with chalk dust and then slowly wipes it off with his forearm. Okay, it looks better than it sounds. And the eventual picnic scene engineered by Rachel to capture Finn’s attention works all too well — they start kissing but then…well, the running gag of hitting a postman with a car made me burst out laughing just thinking about it. Again, better to witness than to hear about.

In between, some great musical numbers. The club (let’s start calling it by its hilarious name, New Directions - say it out loud, quickly, without pausing between the words; yeah, that’s right) performs an unapproved Fosse-style version of Salt-n-Pepa’s “Push It” at a school assembly, bumping and grinding all over the place; Quinn and her Cheerios bust out with an impossibly suggestive version of “I Say a Little Prayer for You” — I felt so dirty watching this number; Rachel busts out with a plaintive show-ending “Take a Bow” when she realizes that Finn won’t be so easy to land. All are beautifully filmed, impeccably choreographed, and thoroughly ridiculous. And I loved every minute of them.

Because this is the perfect storm, y’all: a funny show with emotionally charged characters; a soap opera with musical numbers; a show that takes high school seriously enough to joke about it in very broad strokes. It’s the kind of show you bond with, think about, anticipate.

And I’m going to be writing about it every week. Next time, I promise fewer backstory-type things and more reporting about actual funny lines and stuff.

Oh and I left out the best spoiler. I’ll put it in the comments below if you want to see it. Pretty good one this week. Hint: it involves a baby…OR DOES IT?