The Cutprice Guignol

Alright, fasten your seatbelts, hang on to anything that’s nailed down, and hope we don’t burn up on re-entry: Glee has officially jettisoned itself from reality.

Britney/Brittany is only the second episode of this season, but I think it’s a real turning point for the show: there is little to no attempt to ground this in reality, extensive song-and-dance numbers taking place in anaesthesia-ridden fantasy, a complete acrimonious divorce from the real world. There’s no going back after this. You can’t have this great big lumbering ridiculousness in the middle of a show, and pretend it’s still even adjacent to any experiences anyone has had at any point over the course of their lives. You just can’t. You can’t build a significant amount of the plot around people having drug-induced hallucinations and call it anything other that stupid. I refuse.

Which is not to say that I don’t love this episode, because I do. Last season’s Madonna expo is a standout of that first season to me, and Britney Spears, as an artist, defined so much of the era of music I grew up with. I was bouncing around on my flat ass to all of these songs and I’ve been singing them under my breath all day since; they’re bops, alright? And they’re bops that take me back to a specific point of my childhood – hair wraps and frosted blue eyeshadow and empire-line tops – in a way I can’t help but enjoy. Even outside of the music, though, it’s an outrageously entertaining forty minutes, a gleeful (heh) delve into the collective unconscious of some of the silst characters you’ve ever met, and I had a blast with this one.

I mean, let’s talk about these performances first: this is truly the ascension of Heather Morris and Naya Rivera, two of the show’s most compelling and talented performers, and getting to see Morris take on the iconic choreo for stuff like Slave 4 U and Me Against the Music feels like a religious experience. I’m not going to say anything about Naya Rivera in that white suit in Me Against the Music, except that it’s very appropriate that I’m writing this recap in Pride month, given that this outfit reached into the closet and pulled me out by the collar.

This episode could just be a forty-minute run-through of Heather Morris doing every major Britney hit from the preceding twenty years, and I would have gobbled it up with a spoon.

But it’s not just her incredible dance skills that had me falling even more in love with her this week – nah, she’s so damn funny in this episode too. There is something about her innocently deadpan delivery that always has me on the floor (“this looks like the inside of the spaceship where I got probed” took me out), and she’s up there with Sue by the end of this season for the funniest characters in the show. All hail Heather Morris; please reply to my many, many emails.

Elsewhere in the episode, Mr Schu is faced with a stand-off against Emma’s new man Carl (John Stamos). Now, I actually really love Will when the show recognizes that he’s being a huge fucking asshole: he often acts like one, but it usually feels like that’s more of an accident than an intention. I think Matthew Morrison is a lot of fun when he gets to place a bit of knobend, and I enjoy him a lot this week, especially his feud with Kurt about actually performing songs that aren’t easy listening.

Though, of course, it’s his “sexy” performance with the kids (already off to a bad start) in Toxic that really severs the last ties to reality – even though the logic behind us is explained by the plot, as he tries to prove he’s fun and chill, the reality is that if a teacher got up and performed this in front of a school surrounded by teenagers, he would be taken out back and shot, and rightly so. It’s exactly the right pitch for the drama this week, and Stamos makes for a fun foil to Will; though there’s not a lot of Sue in this episode, her warning Will of an impending letter from her lawyer, Gloria Aldred, was probably the line of the week.

This is no longer a show even arguably trying to tell a story about teenagers; it’s a delivery device for nonsense. Any episode that balances a hefty amount of the plot on people huffing anaesthesia is simply not a particularly realistic one, but, when it’s this much fun, it’s hard to care. But, at the same time – this is a sign of things to come for the show, a sign of just how detached from reality it’s going to get, and without that grounding, it’s going to get harder and harder to forgive the bad.

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(header image via NPR)