The reason for the choir singing original material: Murphy hires hacks to write the songs and buys their publishing rights (or a major share thereof) which means more money to him and the cast from the downloads and CD sales. He’s said as much, basically whining that the show’s first few CDs sold by the boatload but he and the actors received very little from it (I think Corey Monteith said his share from the first CD was around $9,000).
Although of course that depends on people actually buying these crappy songs.
No cite, but ISTR reading a quote where Monteith said his share of the money from their first soundtrack album was way less than that, like under $1000. I may be misremembering, but whatever the figure was I was surprised by how little it was.
You’re probably right- the $9,000 was a number that seemed familiar but it coule have been way less. I just remember it was very little in “TV star money” terms.
They probably earned more on the tours, and since I don’t see GLEE having much of a life in syndication (it’s very rare for a 60 minute long show to do well 5 years after it was made) the actors probably don’t have much by way of residuals coming their way, so they need to rake it in now.
I’m trying to figure how the show can last two more seasons. They’ll be following the post graduation exploits of 30 people plus 12 still in Glee Club by then.
I was kind of hoping it wouldn’t be renewed, so I could stop watching it. I’ve threatened to quit this show before but I’m not sure I have the willpower.
I don’t think it’s quite as bad as that. Unique and the 2.0s (band name!) seem like they’re all supposed to be sophomores this year, so two years from now they’ll be getting ready to graduate from high school.
By my calculations <bangs on adding machine> we currently have 8 characters from the graduating class of 2012 who are still recurring characters on the show. Another 5-7 New Directions members will graduate in 2013. I don’t think anyone knows or cares whether Sugar and Dreadlocks are class of 2013 or 2014, but since they’re already total deadweight I don’t think the show will keep them at McKinley any longer than that. So by season six there will be 7 new glee club members, the 5 newbies from this year, and 15 alumni for a total of…27 current and alumni members of New Directions who might still be recurring characters on the show. Or 25 if Sugar and Dreadlocks disappear down the memory hole like that one black guy from season one. So that’s less than 42, but still way more major characters than most shows have without even counting Glee’s teachers, administrators, parents, rival show choir members, or other students at McKinley and NYADA.
I am hoping, for their own sake, that most of the season 1-2 actors are able to go on to other things and not hang around on Glee for two more years. I think Naya Rivera has the best chance of avoiding being typecast, and I could easily see her in a major role on another show. Chris Colfer will likely just be offered a bunch of sassy gay friend roles, but he’s already had some success as a screenwriter and novelist and may wish to go in that direction. Several of the cast members already have backgrounds on Broadway and if they went back to that they’d presumably be a bigger draw for tourists than they were before.
There is some precedent. There were 11 seasons of MAS*H.
Maybe one of the plotlines from next year will take place in Dublin and feature Rory trying to break into the Irish rap scene. Becky moves into an apartment with him and becomes involved in the IRA, while Beiste becomes pregnant by Will with a baby that Quinn will return to kidnap in a special episode that guest stars Clay Aiken as Will’s illegitimate half-brother Oral.
Well, they are currently balancing between NYC and Lima, Ohio - so maybe they will just add a third cast, throw a few characters into welfare and unemployment and having them sing at subway stations and live in cardboard boxes. Sort of “non-Rent”.
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Sort of “non-Rent”.
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A mashup of GLEE and RENT would open a vortex of obnoxious and unlikable entitled characters that could never be closed.
I feel the same way, and maybe that’s why I liked this episode more than I perhaps should have. What they did with “Don’t Stop Believin’” was ludicrously good, and I can forgive a lot of sins just because of that. However, I thought that the parallels between Marley and Rachel in this episode were actually warranted and did thematic work, as opposed to past episodes when it has looked like nothing more than lazy writing. If not the end, Rachel is at least reaching a major milestone in her journey, while Marley’s is just beginning.
Of course, none of that forgives the stupidities of Sam’s psychosis, Roz’s presence, or Rachel thanking Finn for beating up her boyfriend. But with Glee, you gotta live with some things.
I will say that I’m wondering what they’re going to do with Becky, because I honestly thought they were going to just drop it, but Blaine obviously realizes something is wrong and Becky is lashing out more than usual. If we’re going a route that will prove Sue wrong to have covered up for her, I will be very impressed.
They should fire the showrunner and hire you.
And they deserve to lose regionals (which judging by the # of eps left this season they probably will) if they use Marley’s crappy songs.
I’d feel a lot better about the Rachel 2.0 storyline if they’d omitted that voice-over line where she complained about how everyone else was acting like they had PTSD. The big difference between Original Rachel and Rachel 2.0 has been that the latter is both less confident and less self-absorbed. Being annoyed that other people were acting weird and jumpy after a seriously traumatic experience where they all believed their lives were in danger not only seemed out of character for her, but would have been extreme even for season 1-2 Rachel. I mean, when Burt had a heart attack Rachel did manage to find a way to make it all about her – she sang “Papa, Can You See Me?” at Finn even though it’s not clear she’d ever even met Burt before – but at least we didn’t hear her say/think that Kurt needed to grow a pair and stop whining about how maybe his dad was dying.
I understand that interpretation, but that’s not the way I read it. I thought that it was more that she was concerned about her friends more than annoyed. Of course, she still saw the whole thing in terms of how she could bring up the idea of performing her songs, but that’s normal teen self-centeredness. Even the performance of “You Have More Friends Than You Know” combined her desire to push her songs with her desire to help her friends feel better.
Glee is back tonight with an episode titled “Lights Out”.
So, earlier today I saw a clip from the recent GLAAD Media Awards, where Darren Criss was asked on the red carpet about Glee being renewed for another two seasons. While he didn’t exactly say anything negative, his tone of voice and facial expressions certainly suggested that he’s painfully aware of the Faustian bargain he made when he signed onto this show.
Perhaps he was thinking of this week’s episode in particular, although he escaped pretty lightly – all he had to do was get through a re-creation of the (probably NSFW) video for the Eric Prydz remix of “Call On Me” and tell Sue that she needed to return to McKinley for the good of the Cheerios. Unfortunately, there’s no apparent in-world reason why the latter should be true. While Jane Lynch is certainly a better actress than Nene Leakes, the show has spent a lot of time telling us that Leakes’s character is basically just “black Sue”. So why shouldn’t she replace her as cheer coach? Yelling at the girls and demanding they have unnecessary cosmetic surgery doesn’t seem any worse than Sue’s usual behavior. Becky says she wants Sue to come back and it’s strongly implied that she comes clean to Principal Figgins in order to make this possible, yet the gun incident and pretty much every other scene with Becky over the past two seasons indicates that Sue has actually been a terrible influence on her.
But while this is bad, it’s not (for Glee) unusually bad. What’s bad even by the low standards I have for Glee is that the writers resorted to a confession of childhood sexual abuse in an attempt to get a little more mileage out of their stupid, boring catfishing plot. I thought there were no further depths to which they could sink after the school shooting episode, but I was wrong.
As soon as Finn 2.0 said he had told his online mystery friend a secret he’d never told anyone else, I thought “Oh no, they’re going to say he was molested as a child.” At first this just seemed like an 11th hour attempt to make the audience give a damn about Finn 2.0 and Quinn 2.0. To be fair, this is a task that requires extreme measures, but I couldn’t help thinking how much more of an impact this storyline would have made had it involved characters I found remotely interesting…or if it hadn’t come immediately after an episode that played the trauma of its young characters for cheap laughs. Still, Glee has been doing PSA episodes for a long time and it was probably inevitable that they’d get around to child abuse sooner or later. But there were way too many other things going on in this episode for this to carry much weight, and the end made it pretty clear that this was just something the writers came up with to delay revealing who the catfish is.* It was so obviously contrived for this purpose that for a brief moment I actually thought Finn 2.0 was going to confess he made the whole thing up in an attempt to get his mystery friend to reveal herself.
Other than that, well, I thought that Santana storyline was pretty good. Heck, it was nice just to see Santana get a storyline at all.
Sarah Jessica Parker also returned as Kurt’s fairy godmother, and was nice enough to ask how Burt was doing. I guess the writers suddenly remembered that they gave him cancer for Christmas. They must have gotten so wrapped up with that “Rachel’s pregnant! Ha ha, just kidding! Oh yeah, and her boyfriend’s a whore” storyline that it slipped their minds for nine episodes or so.
*FWIW, I am now fairly certain it’s going to turn out to be Brittany. I don’t want this to be true, because it’s stupid and makes no sense, but if the show is playing fair with us (a questionable assumption, I know) then she’s the only person it could be.
And everything… was beautiful… at the ba - let.
Saw that coming up 5th Avenue. Loved it.
I couldn’t agree more about the molestation reveal. I was thinking “Please don’t let him have had his naughty bits touched, please… have him find out his mother was really his grandmother and his father was really his mother or he was born without testicles or something”, but nope, the 9th graders who wrote it went for the obvious.
Maybe it’ll be the babysitter who’s texting him, she’ll be played by an Olsen twin who’ll return and kidnap him and force him to do a Jesus Christ Superstar medley so we’ll get some good Lloyd Webber-Rice music going, and since she’s all better now she’ll be the new assistant coach of the Cheerios and sponsor of the Anorexia Club once Becky is moved up to Vice Principal/Skeet Shooting Team.
Santana’s from an impoverished immigrant family that had money for ballet lessons. This show really doesn’t understand the concept of being poor, does it?
On the upside, I liked the music better than from any episode since West Side Story.
I enjoyed the “Stomp” version of “We Will Rock You” and the end song “For the Longest Time”
Last week I kinda wished they did do “Swwet Dreams” though I’m not sure who could pull it off.
Brian
I assumed the “Darren and Christopher will be there” was some sort of feeble inside joke for Darren Criss and Christopher Colfer. If so, it was a bit too blunt.
Speaking of Darren Criss, his butt was certainly prominently displayed this episode- not a bad thing, but again, a bit too blunt. And while I know Jane Lynch is tall, I was surprised how she towers over him.
OK, so how bizarre was that to have a show about child molestation, and then have Sue (Jane Lynch) do her song from her upcoming Broadway debut in ANNIE (opens May 16th) of “Little Girls”?!?!
Shameless plug, and perhaps just a tad inappropriate for the theme of the show?!
They seem to be turning every show into a “very special episode of Blossom”…what’s next? Using safe words when doing S&M? Using clean needles when shooting up? The dangers of doing tattoos and piercings at home?
Once again, it was the NYC segments that were the best - no need to pretend the singers and dancers learned songs and dance steps in 30 minutes during study hall.
Wasn’t it just last year they were unsure if Glee would be renewed, thus the fear of trying to do a spin-off in NYC? And now they have renewed for two years?
Looks like we are doomed to have an upcoming episode of the best of David Hasselfhoff songs.
Classic Glee… some wonderful musical numbers (even though they tried to ruin At The Ballet, they couldn’t), some funny moments, a bafflingly illogical framing device (how long was that blackout?), an ongoing drawn out plot line of suspense that we just don’t care about (Ryder’s mystery girl), and a painfully earnest public service message.
And, as always, various Glee club members totally MIA (I believe Brittany was gone this week, alone with Joe (dreadlocks) and Sugar, both of whom have been absent for at least 3 episodes with no one noticing.)