Glee and character integrity/continuity
A week or so ago, 
wordplaying posted a question about Glee:A few weeks ago my husband made me listen to a snippet of a Nerdist interview with Joss Whedon in which he said this:The one thing I cannot stand, and I’m not even gonna say which one, but there was a show I watched, like, religiously and the moment I realized the characters were just saying whatever was convenient for, you know, the agenda of the show? I shut down, completely, I was like ‘oh, these aren’t real characters, I don’t care about them anymore.’ I went from ‘can’t miss’ to ‘can’t watch’ in the space of an episode, because you absolutely have to respect that integrity or you’re not building off of anything.
And the reason my husband made me listen to it was because my husband was like, “I’m pretty sure he’s talking about Glee" and I have to concede that it’s a real possibility; he was an outspoken fan in S1 (Joss is a big musical theatre fan) and even directed an episode, and then… he was saying nothing about it.
So: do you think that’s a fair criticism of Glee? Do you share it?
marauder-in-warblerland reblogged the post and added:Even if Joss wasn’t specifically talking about Glee, it’s worth talking about what it means for the show to play a little fast and loose with their own internal logic. Is that the death knell for our suspension of disbelief? If so, what are the compensating factors for those of us who still love the show?
I'm responding here rather than on Tumblr because I just cannot deal with Tumblr for long text posts, especially when it comes to tracking responses.
I think Joss probably was talking about Glee, or at least could easily have been, and in fact I share the frustration he describes, although I would frame it a little differently. The way I have described my main frustration with the show for over a year now is that the show has always been willing to throw character continuity out the window for the sake of a cheap joke. I wouldn't say that there's no continuity or integrity; it does exist, particularly in the costuming and the actors' choices. But as far as the writing goes, the integrity is... I'll be diplomatic and say "intermittent." I suppose one can see integrity as an all-or-nothing proposition -- either there's character integrity or there's not -- and I suspect that's what Joss means. But personally, especially with Glee, I can easily (though not happily) move back and forth between immersing myself in the characters' experiences and commenting on the ways in which the narrative on my screen is doing a disservice to the characters as would-be coherent constructs. (And here I am tempted to drop a narrative theory bomb about the differences between mimetic and synthetic character functions, but I shall refrain.)
Look, Glee is a musical set in an aggressively unrealistic high school (seriously, Sunnydale High was more realistic than McKinley); the kids break into song in the hallways and recreate Whitney Houston videos and don't rehearse for Nationals. If I can suspend my disbelief for that stuff, I can handwave some poor writing. I may fume about it, and I may even post grumpy comments about it, but I can handwave it; it doesn't automatically destroy my enjoyment of the show.
I would bet a box of doughnuts that
wordplaying's original post prompted some comments along the line of "Oh, that's totally why I stopped watching; the show was so much better in S1!", because that seems to be the standard party line for a certain segment of Glee fandom, or perhaps ex-fandom or anti-fandom. Which always makes me roll my eyes a little, because for me, at least, S1 had exactly the same problems but fewer emotional rewards, and it only got away with it because the characters were so much less established at that point that the gaffes were less obvious. The very first "continuity? what continuity?" *facepalm* moment I had with the show was a scene early in S1 -- 1x04, I think -- in which Quinn and some of the other cheerleaders make fun of Rachel for wearing a pantsuit... except that Rachel never wears a pantsuit before or after that scene. God knows Rachel has her fashion tragedies, but it makes no sense for that to be one of them. It's a throwaway moment, but it's emblematic of Glee's approach to character, which is that the characters generally make a reasonable amount of emotional sense right up until the writers decide to have them do something ~UNEXPECTED~ for the sake of (ostensible) comedy or (unnecessary) drama or whatever else it is the writers are amusing themselves with that week. (See, for example, almost every volte-face of Sue Sylvester's in the course of the entire show.)
But the thing is, I'm not watching Glee for the plot (which is why the competition eps generally don't interest me much); I'm watching Glee for the characters and the relationships. Watched from that point of view, the A-plots of most episodes are basically decorative, and character torquing for the sake of a specific A-plot is generally easy to handwave (unless the plot is actually ABOUT the character or relationship and the OOC action affects the shape of future episodes, in which case I am more likely to struggle). It's like those graphs with lots of dots that more or less cohere along a line: there are usually some outliers, some random dots, but what's most significant is the trendline.
And the rewards are the same as they've always been: I care about some of the characters -- which shows that the writers are getting some key things right -- and am deeply invested in those characters' experiences, their development, their happiness. I care very little for the show's plot premise (I am not invested in the fate of a high school glee club run by an idiot except insofar as the characters I care about are invested in it), but I care a great deal for the show's emotional premise, which is using music to make sense of the world. And that is something the show continues, albeit sometimes more sporadically than I would like, to deliver.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth
wordplaying posted a question about Glee:A few weeks ago my husband made me listen to a snippet of a Nerdist interview with Joss Whedon in which he said this:The one thing I cannot stand, and I’m not even gonna say which one, but there was a show I watched, like, religiously and the moment I realized the characters were just saying whatever was convenient for, you know, the agenda of the show? I shut down, completely, I was like ‘oh, these aren’t real characters, I don’t care about them anymore.’ I went from ‘can’t miss’ to ‘can’t watch’ in the space of an episode, because you absolutely have to respect that integrity or you’re not building off of anything.
And the reason my husband made me listen to it was because my husband was like, “I’m pretty sure he’s talking about Glee" and I have to concede that it’s a real possibility; he was an outspoken fan in S1 (Joss is a big musical theatre fan) and even directed an episode, and then… he was saying nothing about it.
So: do you think that’s a fair criticism of Glee? Do you share it?
marauder-in-warblerland reblogged the post and added:Even if Joss wasn’t specifically talking about Glee, it’s worth talking about what it means for the show to play a little fast and loose with their own internal logic. Is that the death knell for our suspension of disbelief? If so, what are the compensating factors for those of us who still love the show?
I'm responding here rather than on Tumblr because I just cannot deal with Tumblr for long text posts, especially when it comes to tracking responses.
I think Joss probably was talking about Glee, or at least could easily have been, and in fact I share the frustration he describes, although I would frame it a little differently. The way I have described my main frustration with the show for over a year now is that the show has always been willing to throw character continuity out the window for the sake of a cheap joke. I wouldn't say that there's no continuity or integrity; it does exist, particularly in the costuming and the actors' choices. But as far as the writing goes, the integrity is... I'll be diplomatic and say "intermittent." I suppose one can see integrity as an all-or-nothing proposition -- either there's character integrity or there's not -- and I suspect that's what Joss means. But personally, especially with Glee, I can easily (though not happily) move back and forth between immersing myself in the characters' experiences and commenting on the ways in which the narrative on my screen is doing a disservice to the characters as would-be coherent constructs. (And here I am tempted to drop a narrative theory bomb about the differences between mimetic and synthetic character functions, but I shall refrain.)
Look, Glee is a musical set in an aggressively unrealistic high school (seriously, Sunnydale High was more realistic than McKinley); the kids break into song in the hallways and recreate Whitney Houston videos and don't rehearse for Nationals. If I can suspend my disbelief for that stuff, I can handwave some poor writing. I may fume about it, and I may even post grumpy comments about it, but I can handwave it; it doesn't automatically destroy my enjoyment of the show.
I would bet a box of doughnuts that
wordplaying's original post prompted some comments along the line of "Oh, that's totally why I stopped watching; the show was so much better in S1!", because that seems to be the standard party line for a certain segment of Glee fandom, or perhaps ex-fandom or anti-fandom. Which always makes me roll my eyes a little, because for me, at least, S1 had exactly the same problems but fewer emotional rewards, and it only got away with it because the characters were so much less established at that point that the gaffes were less obvious. The very first "continuity? what continuity?" *facepalm* moment I had with the show was a scene early in S1 -- 1x04, I think -- in which Quinn and some of the other cheerleaders make fun of Rachel for wearing a pantsuit... except that Rachel never wears a pantsuit before or after that scene. God knows Rachel has her fashion tragedies, but it makes no sense for that to be one of them. It's a throwaway moment, but it's emblematic of Glee's approach to character, which is that the characters generally make a reasonable amount of emotional sense right up until the writers decide to have them do something ~UNEXPECTED~ for the sake of (ostensible) comedy or (unnecessary) drama or whatever else it is the writers are amusing themselves with that week. (See, for example, almost every volte-face of Sue Sylvester's in the course of the entire show.)
But the thing is, I'm not watching Glee for the plot (which is why the competition eps generally don't interest me much); I'm watching Glee for the characters and the relationships. Watched from that point of view, the A-plots of most episodes are basically decorative, and character torquing for the sake of a specific A-plot is generally easy to handwave (unless the plot is actually ABOUT the character or relationship and the OOC action affects the shape of future episodes, in which case I am more likely to struggle). It's like those graphs with lots of dots that more or less cohere along a line: there are usually some outliers, some random dots, but what's most significant is the trendline.
And the rewards are the same as they've always been: I care about some of the characters -- which shows that the writers are getting some key things right -- and am deeply invested in those characters' experiences, their development, their happiness. I care very little for the show's plot premise (I am not invested in the fate of a high school glee club run by an idiot except insofar as the characters I care about are invested in it), but I care a great deal for the show's emotional premise, which is using music to make sense of the world. And that is something the show continues, albeit sometimes more sporadically than I would like, to deliver.
Originally posted at Dreamwidth || Read
comments on Dreamwidth