Category: Glee
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Fall Television “Preview”: Four series with problems to solve
With September upon us, the fall television season is just around the corner. At random times over the next few weeks, I’ll be posting some preview-like pieces about what is to come over the next few months. Just like last year, I haven’t seen any of the season’s new series – no pilots or anything.…
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2010-2011 season wrap: Ranking the episodes of Glee’s second season
The other day, I mentioned that ranking the episodes of Community‘s second season was one of the most difficult lists I had ever done. Doing a similar list of Glee’s second season was, well, less difficult. I wrote about Glee a lot this season and realized that I would really just be repeating myself if…
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Season Finale — Glee, “New York”
Earlier this year, The A.V. Club’s Todd Van Der Werff wrote a great piece with an unfortunate, yet completely valid headline. It reads, “Community and Glee are pretty much the same show.” Obviously, the headline alone was enough to send the AVC community into a tizzy, but Todd’s piece is basically completely on-point. The first…
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Glee, “Funeral”
Note: I’m traveling today, so this will probably be shorter than normal. Glee has a problem with penultimate episodes, apparently. Last season, FOX swapped the intended penultimate episode “Theatricality” with “Funk” because they wanted the former’s Lady Gaga-centric content to line up with the release of the latest soundtrack. This of course brought us the…
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Glee, “Prom Queen”
I don’t really hate spoilers. In today’s internet- and social media-powered landscape, spoilers are bound to happen. During the early seasons of Lost, I used to read spoilers on a regular basis until I realized that I was completely ruining my viewing experience. But Lost is a series that preyed so much on our lack of understanding…
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Glee, “Rumours”
Before “Rumours” aired last night, I tweeted that I had this weird feeling that the final string of episodes was going to be pretty strong. Despite my issues with the length (and the subsequent Kurt lovefest that resulted because of it), I thought last week’s episode was very good and it set up a number…
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Glee, “Born This Way”
When it was announced a month or so ago, I just assumed a 90-minute episode of Glee would be one of the worst things ever. Some of the episodes from this season have felt extremely long within the 42 minute structure, so I couldn’t even really imagine having to deal with another 20 minutes. Ultimately,…
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The show about nothing — The problem with Glee’s second season
A few of the series I regularly cover here at TVS are on hiatus this week. In lieu of writing reviews of new episodes, I thought this would be a good time to take stock of where we’ve been this season and where we’re headed in the final string of episodes. In these posts I’ll…
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Glee, “Original Song”
If there’s one thing that Glee has consistently done well is the competition episodes. “Sectionals” is one of the top five episodes in the series’ short run on the air, “Journey” worked wonders in spite of itself and I actually found season two’s Sectionals episode “Special Education” to be pretty damn good as well. Of…
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Glee, “Blame It on the Alcohol”
I’ve already gone back and forth on “Blame It on the Alcohol” a few times since it finished airing here almost four hours ago. While I was watching it, I kind of liked it. Then afterwards, I kind of hated it. Then I went back and forth a few more times before just decided to…
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Glee, “Comeback”
I entered my viewing of “Comeback” with loads of dread. Sue has been disastrously insufferable this year and the idea of her joining New Directions just a week after the near-greatness that was “Silly Love Songs” just made me sad. Watching this episode through that lens, I found “Comeback” to be surprising in its general…
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Glee, “Silly Love Songs”
I, like most people, was not too kind to the post-Super Bowl episode of Glee. “The Sue Sylvester Shuffle” was a disastrous attempt to introduce the series’ primary narratives and beats to a new audience. In classic Glee form, the series turns right around two days later and knocks out its second best episode of the season…
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Glee, “The Sue Sylvester Shuffle”
Although so much of the discourse has focused on how Glee and the Super Bowl seem like such an insane and difficult pairing, I tend to believe the opposite is actually true. The Super Bowl is most certainly the greatest spectacle in America. It’s all about the grandiose, the loud, the bright, etc. For better or…
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Glee, “A Very Glee Christmas”
If there’s any series that should be able to integrate the overwhelming joy that is supposed to come from Christmas specials, it’s Glee. The combination just seems so obvious, which is perhaps why I can’t really say that I’ll be too critical of this episode. But at the same time, there needs to be some…
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Glee, “Special Education”
Glee‘s competition episodes should be a big event. Of all the things the series does really well, it’s big, celebratory moments. Those moments don’t require any subtlety and instead the series can just revel in grand gestures, lots of smiles and soaring hooks. The wedding sequences last week we just wonderful, despite the angelic rendering of…
CB, PhD 