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Finishing 'Glee' 10 Years Later
So today was the 10th anniversary of Glee, a TV show which originally ran from 2009 until 2015. However, I only help up with it until 2014, bailing about halfway through a very poor Season 5, and I didn't catch up when I heard the show was ending the following year.
However, this past week, I decided it was finally time to finish was, ultimately, a very formative show for me. It ties together disparate times in my life in a way very few media properties do, and I'm extremely happy I finally saw this show through to the end in honor of this milestone. I didn't start the show over from the beginning, but rather from Episode 14 of Season 5, a couple of episodes before I had stopped watching originally, and when the show had done a soft reset which made picking it up again from that point much less daunting and confusing.
Frankly, I didn't expect to have a big emotional reaction when I finally went back and finished this show. Though upon further reflection, it was inevitable I was going to have some pretty intense emotions about it, and I'm glad that - for the most part - they turned out to be good ones.
The Glee Pilot episode premiered on May 19, 2009 - during my last month of high school. It was fun, irreverent, and groundbreaking in all the right ways and I spent the summer between high school and college obsessed with this show that had only aired one episode. The first half of the first season saw me through the most difficult time in my entire life, and the later half of the season aired in time to help me heal from it. The next few seasons unfolded as I grappled with massive changes with my life and coming to terms with my own sexuality, even though in many way the show itself began to crumble.
Seasons Two and Three of the show aired when I was studying alone at community college, essentially alone and friendless outside social media. Through characters like Kurt, Blaine, Santana, and even Karofsky I began dealing with a lot of repressed feelings I had not only regarding my sexual orientation, but about my entire high school experience and the expectations I had set out for myself during my adolescence. It helped me hold onto a love of the hobbies I'd devoted my time to in high school even as I moved on from them. It also made me realize that I missed out on way less than I thought I did at the time. I still wouldn't call my high school years great, but it's all relative. These characters essentially stayed rooted in the people they were as teenagers, and I was happily moving beyond that.
I was studying abroad in Rome for the summer between my Junior and Senior year of college when Cory Monteith died. It was the first time I'd ever cried over the death of a celebrity. I was by no means a hardcore follower of any particular character or actor from the show, but I was very unsubtle about the fact that I had a massive gay crush on Finn Hudson during a period of my life when I was aware of my bisexuality but extremely closeted. The show itself never really recovered from his loss, though in it's very public grieving it helped me deal with the massive changes in my life. In 2010 my life plan went off the rails in a big way, and in the years since I've been coming to terms with the fact that I'm never going to have the life or career I dreamed of as a teenager. This is by no means the same as dealing with the death of a friend, but the show had to abandon the happy ending it had planned and create an entirely new one. The fact that that was still possible meant more than I really knew at the time.
In 2014 I stopped watching the show. It wasn't that it had become unwatchable - In fact, I had made it through the first part of season 5 that, with the exception of the tribute episode to Cory, was actually unwatchable, and it was now in a period of course correction. Rather, it was because I didn't need the show anymore. While the characters started over in college, I was graduating college with a better outlook on life and healthier relationships and a sense of self.
Over the years, I'd always said I'd finish the show. Usually it'd manifest as a threat in a tweet like "I'm gonna hit rock bottom and finish Glee". To a point, I do resent the show in the same way everyone else does. But in watching the final 20 episodes of the show for the first time, I found that it was actually better that the worst parts of it that had stuck out in my mind all these years. It handled serious issues in a clumsy, sometimes irresponsible way, but it never lacked heart when it did. A sense of optimism in the face of failure and heartbreak is something I'd never really gotten the hang of, but it's something Glee has had all along.
Today I watched that 3D Concert Movie for the first time (it was bad, don't waste your time) and I watched the final two episodes of the series. The first episode "2009", played in parallel to the pilot that aired ten years ago today, and the finale showed what everyone would be up to in five years time (2020). I made me reflect on how far I'd come in the past ten years, and how I may not have the ambition to conquer an industry like I once did, I'm finally someone willing to open myself up to joy. And isn't that the very definition of Glee?
However, this past week, I decided it was finally time to finish was, ultimately, a very formative show for me. It ties together disparate times in my life in a way very few media properties do, and I'm extremely happy I finally saw this show through to the end in honor of this milestone. I didn't start the show over from the beginning, but rather from Episode 14 of Season 5, a couple of episodes before I had stopped watching originally, and when the show had done a soft reset which made picking it up again from that point much less daunting and confusing.
Frankly, I didn't expect to have a big emotional reaction when I finally went back and finished this show. Though upon further reflection, it was inevitable I was going to have some pretty intense emotions about it, and I'm glad that - for the most part - they turned out to be good ones.
The Glee Pilot episode premiered on May 19, 2009 - during my last month of high school. It was fun, irreverent, and groundbreaking in all the right ways and I spent the summer between high school and college obsessed with this show that had only aired one episode. The first half of the first season saw me through the most difficult time in my entire life, and the later half of the season aired in time to help me heal from it. The next few seasons unfolded as I grappled with massive changes with my life and coming to terms with my own sexuality, even though in many way the show itself began to crumble.
Seasons Two and Three of the show aired when I was studying alone at community college, essentially alone and friendless outside social media. Through characters like Kurt, Blaine, Santana, and even Karofsky I began dealing with a lot of repressed feelings I had not only regarding my sexual orientation, but about my entire high school experience and the expectations I had set out for myself during my adolescence. It helped me hold onto a love of the hobbies I'd devoted my time to in high school even as I moved on from them. It also made me realize that I missed out on way less than I thought I did at the time. I still wouldn't call my high school years great, but it's all relative. These characters essentially stayed rooted in the people they were as teenagers, and I was happily moving beyond that.
I was studying abroad in Rome for the summer between my Junior and Senior year of college when Cory Monteith died. It was the first time I'd ever cried over the death of a celebrity. I was by no means a hardcore follower of any particular character or actor from the show, but I was very unsubtle about the fact that I had a massive gay crush on Finn Hudson during a period of my life when I was aware of my bisexuality but extremely closeted. The show itself never really recovered from his loss, though in it's very public grieving it helped me deal with the massive changes in my life. In 2010 my life plan went off the rails in a big way, and in the years since I've been coming to terms with the fact that I'm never going to have the life or career I dreamed of as a teenager. This is by no means the same as dealing with the death of a friend, but the show had to abandon the happy ending it had planned and create an entirely new one. The fact that that was still possible meant more than I really knew at the time.
In 2014 I stopped watching the show. It wasn't that it had become unwatchable - In fact, I had made it through the first part of season 5 that, with the exception of the tribute episode to Cory, was actually unwatchable, and it was now in a period of course correction. Rather, it was because I didn't need the show anymore. While the characters started over in college, I was graduating college with a better outlook on life and healthier relationships and a sense of self.
Over the years, I'd always said I'd finish the show. Usually it'd manifest as a threat in a tweet like "I'm gonna hit rock bottom and finish Glee". To a point, I do resent the show in the same way everyone else does. But in watching the final 20 episodes of the show for the first time, I found that it was actually better that the worst parts of it that had stuck out in my mind all these years. It handled serious issues in a clumsy, sometimes irresponsible way, but it never lacked heart when it did. A sense of optimism in the face of failure and heartbreak is something I'd never really gotten the hang of, but it's something Glee has had all along.
Today I watched that 3D Concert Movie for the first time (it was bad, don't waste your time) and I watched the final two episodes of the series. The first episode "2009", played in parallel to the pilot that aired ten years ago today, and the finale showed what everyone would be up to in five years time (2020). I made me reflect on how far I'd come in the past ten years, and how I may not have the ambition to conquer an industry like I once did, I'm finally someone willing to open myself up to joy. And isn't that the very definition of Glee?