Anyway, Glee is coming back in April. I had a wishlist all worked out in my head but from what I hear, my first item might be taken care of. It was . . .
1. Idina Menzel comes on as Rachel's surrogate mother. I hear that she's actually coming on, and that's probably the role she's playing. I mean, I try not to read spoilers but I hear rumors sometimes and that's one I hear. I have been rooting for this since the first episode, continuing my highly prescient abilities to predict plotlines on teen television. For example, my sister and I were rooting for a Joey-Pacey pairing before the theme song played on the first episode of Dawson's Creek. And then, when promos were running for the summer show that ran in between Dawson's Creek seasons, American something-or-other, sponsored by Coke, showing a father saying, "You can't be with him!" to his daughter, I immediately said, "Because she's your sister!" Yup, that's why he was saying it.
(On a completely separate note, I feel weird about the term "surrogate mother" if it is both the woman's egg and her womb that brought the baby into the world. I mean, in that case, isn't she just "mother" or even "biological mother"?)
So here's hoping the rest of my wish list comes true:
2. Kurt and Finn as stepbrothers! Come on, it'd be awesome! At least let us flirt with the possiblity.
3. More songs per episode. I love the show, I do. But mainly I love that my daughter loves the dance numbers. And we watch them. All the time. All 13 episodes still exist on my Tivo so we can play them whenever she says, "Watch TV! Glee!" But that means that, when an episode like Mattress has only 2 song performances (I'm not counting the song Smile that plays over the concluding montage because there's no dancing and therefore it is not interesting to my daughter), I am keeping 60 minutes of HD Tivo space for only less than five minutes of song. So what would be great for me personally is if we could have at least one song for every two commercial breaks in each episode. Thank you.
And since you're doing this for me personally, I'd like more of those songs to be from musicals, or rock classics, or, you know, songs I know. Thanks.
4. Pick a writing team and go with it. You can't have both the sappy, over-emotional stuff and the funny bulimia pamphlets. You need a tone. So I say you choose the funny team and ditch the melodramatic one. Like, the show is great when we've got Emma Pillsbury telling Rachel Berry that her lack of gag reflex will turn out to be a gift. The show is not great when Sue Sylvester has a Down's Syndrome-having sister. And actually, while I mean that as a synechdoche, I actually have major problems with that particular character development. I mean, aside from being annoyingly sappy, which is the writing team I think they should ditch, it was a bad choice. The brilliance of Sue as a character is her over-the-top evilness. But she only works as a cartoon villain type. If she's human, capable of sympathy, capable of taking good care of her Down's Syndrome-having sister in a loving manner, then the horrible things she says to Quinn about her pregnancy, to Will about his failures, etc., etc., come from a human and therefore sound like horrible things to say, rather than hysterical things to hear.
5. Keep the writing tight. One moment that's been sticking in my craw is when Kurt, initially excited by the idea of a makeover, refuses to work on Rachel because . . . she dresses badly? Who else would you do a makeover on?
6. No more episodes in which the kids start off feeling like losers because they're in Glee Club, and then end up recommitting to Glee Club because it means so much to them. If they already figured that out last episode, we won't really be charmed by them doing it again in the next episode.
7. On the other hand, we could use a little more characterization for the minor characters. That episode where the football players chose Glee over football? Made no sense. We have no idea why they would. But Finn chose football. Even though he had chosen Glee in the two episodes prior. Which speaks to number 5. But I'd like to hear just a little bit more about Brittany, Santana, and the two football players whose names I don't know. Like, I'd like to know their names.
8. It would be awesome if Rachel and Quinn joined forces for some reason.
And that is all I have to say about Glee.
But I'd like to say a few words about Lost.
I don't know where it's all going. I don't. But it seems to me that, just as the show asked me to believe Dr. Jack Shepherd was the most awesome awesome to ever awesome (which I didn't and still don't), the show is now asking me to accept its dichotomy of Jacob=Good and Esau=Bad. But didn't Jacob, through Richard and Ben, arrange for the genocide of the Dharma Initiative? Maybe the show will do a good job of accounting for this. I hope so.
And that is all I have to say about TV.
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