On Glee, characters graduate and leave
Show and characters have matured
It was a brisk, clear, unseasonably warm winter’s afternoon at the 20th Century Fox film lot in Century City, where Glee is made.
Inside, though, on the sound stage Kevin McHale, Jenna Ushkowitz, Darren Criss, Chord Overstreet and the other Glee players have called a home-a-way-from-home for the better part of four years, it was decidedly cool. Chilly, even.
Writer-producer Dante Di Loreto and a handful of Glee performers — Ushkowitz and McHale from the original cast, along with several of this year’s Glee newcomers — were assembled in a makeshift choir room on hard, wooden benches.
They were filming an episode that won’t air until Valentine’s Day but — spoiler alert — evidence of a wedding was everywhere.
The episode, christened I Do — no last-minute surprise-at-the-altar there — focuses on Will (Matthew Morrison) and Emma’s (Jayma Mays) wedding day, and the evidence of pending nuptials ranged from the word “wedding” scrawled across the choirroom chalkboard to the knowing looks, nods and winks the performers shoot each other across the room.
“Well, yes, I think it’s fair to say romance is in the air,” Di Loreto said, with feigned exasperation. “To be honest, though, I think one of the things that’s exciting about this show is that there are certain things that are undeniable. There are certain things you sit at home, watching, and you think to yourself, ‘I really want this to happen.’ These things are true and undeniable.”
Other elements in Glee’s ongoing story are not so predictable.
“There are also things that are going to shock the heck out of you,” Di Loreto added, actually using the word “heck.” “That’s the fun part. That’s what’s coming down the pike.”
I Do will feature a reunion between the old and the new, as the former and current members of McKinley High’s New Directions song-and-dance troupe gather one more time, to celebrate a day of romance and love.
Glee has undergone a metamorphosis this season, after a season that saw most of the original high-school characters graduate and start their new lives as adults. New characters, and new actors, joined the Glee acting company. In Glee, as in a real school, life goes on. Di Loreto echoed Glee cocreators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s insistence that Glee not become one of these TV dramas where school-age characters are still in high school when they’re in their 30s.
Every four years — assuming Glee stays on the air that long — a new group of students will move in, and the old group will move on, some to fame and the bright lights of Broadway, others to relative obscurity. Such is life.
In the real world, the actors have had to adjust to Glee’s carousel of changing faces.
“At the beginning, it was hard, because you miss the people you’ve seen for four years,” Ushkowitz said.
Ushkowitz plays Tina Cohen-Chang, an initially shy, insecure performer with a stutter who first appeared in Glee’s pilot episode in May 2009, and blossomed into the self-possessed singer her character is today.
“But then you realize just how amazing these (new) kids are,” Ushkowitz continued. “They were thrown into this well-oiled machine, but they just took off with us. It’s refreshing, actually. It’s cool, too, to see them where we were three years ago. It’s a process of growing and changing. We’re working right now as a unit, and we’re having a great time.”
McHale — an ablebodied actor who plays wheelchair-bound paraplegic Artie Abrams, the self-described “nerd” and guitarist who uses the glee club as his social safety net — added that it would have been easy for the new cast members to be intimidated.
“It went from us feeling like older brothers and sisters to us learning from them,” McHale said. “It would have been so nice to say they were rude and untalented but, unfortunately, it’s been quite the opposite.”
Glee’s already large ensemble is growing all the time, and it can be hard for the performers to track of the interlocking storylines at times. Glee, McHale quipped, is a show with a lot of moving parts.
“Thank God I don’t have to come up with the storylines because this show would’ve have been cancelled immediately,” he said. “I think, for Artie, getting to direct has been a real boon. It seems natural that he would pursue the directing thing, but I’m just thankful I didn’t have to think of that myself.”
Ushkowitz, for her part, said she appreciates her character’s growth and dawning maturity through the seasons, especially now that Tina has come into her own.
“For the last three seasons it seemed to me she was the underdog of underdogs,” Ushkowitz said. “She got crapped on, constantly. That was great, though, in a way, because it made her who she is. It makes her so much stronger this year, now she’s a senior with so much more confidence.
“I want kids (watching this show) to see me as that girl they relate to come up in the world and gain a confidence she never thought she had, and be able to pursue her dreams. Most people wouldn’t have guessed, at the beginning, that she’d be the one to succeed. I’d really like for kids to see her as a role model for somebody who’s maybe always been in the background and then one day just comes out and whips everybody into shape.”
Di Loreto is grateful that Glee has touched the popular nerve — but mindful, too, that it’s just a TV show.
“I don’t think television shows change the world,” he said quietly. “I think what we do is put a spotlight on certain pieces of the world. People have been singing and dancing forever. The thing is, there was a moment there when that wasn’t on television. There was a time, a long time ago, when you couldn’t be a performer unless you could sing and dance. That changed. We’ve simply put the spotlight back where it was. There are all these people who feel song and dance in their heart, who have these remarkable abilities, but had no way to express them. And that’s where we came in. We want to put the spotlight on things that everyone’s thinking about but nobody’s talking about, and that’s what this show did.
“At the end of the day, though, we’re a television show. We’re three-and-ahalf seasons in. People talk about it like we’ve been around forever. We haven’t. It’s incredibly challenging to produce a musical on prime time TV, based on the budgets, the schedule and the restrictions in storytelling. I’m still excited. The number of musical numbers we’ve done is truly staggering. We’ve learned a lot about the process.
“In the history of TV shows, this is still a very young show. It’s a show that — hopefully — will bear more fruit as we move on.”