Guys, I just don’t know what to think of Glee. It starts tonight, and I thought the pilot in May was mildly entertaining and it features some good actors, but I just can’t get behind it just yet. Which is odd, because you know I love teenagers, and shows about teenagers, and music made by teenagers, and songs about teenagers, and basically any combination of those three things, particularly when expressed with all the melodrama and angst of being 17. Also, there are show tunes. I should love Glee.

But watching it felt like being pandered to. They’re so quirky! High school sucks for them! They’re dreamers! Like you! But with better hair! It felt kind of toothless, honestly, the idiosyncracies too perfectly calculated and the camp lacking in real excess. (Which is why I think Gossip Girl, particularly in the first season and a half, is actually a better representation of high school and a smarter use of camp. The characters are distinctive, but not stereotypes, it’s the setting they’re in that’s outrageous, which is kind of what high school feels like, as if you’re the only real thing in a very absurd and arbitrary set of situations, but wherever you are on the social ladder, it’s not good or special enough so you act into said conventions because you don’t know any other way to be, yet, and this is as true for jocks as it is punk emo kids. Enough of that.)

Glee, to me, is less like high school and more like Great Expectations, with a snarky cheerleading coach instead of the gruesome Miss Havisham, and overwritten bullies instead of, I don’t know, orphanage in 19th century England.  The desire and expectation of the protagonist to be special is the same. Perhaps that’s too much of a leap, but consider:

Cliques being, of course, the class system; Will as the escaped convict Magwitch (unhappily chained in his position as science teacher, but seeing glee club as a kind of freedom and pulling the kids along with him); Rachel (tragically misunderstood prodigy) being Pip; and injustice being the state of the world at large, which, you may have learned, is not fair.

I think it’s a reasonable comparison to make: Dickens was the closest thing to a TV writer of his time. He wrote episodic novels, published in sections over months or years, getting readers hooked on his characters and letting a plot develop over time. And if a show about secretly talented underdogs targeted to appeal to a nation of generally-quite-privileged people who like to think they’re underdogs is exploitative, well, so was Dickens. He too wrote about the underclass for a literate middle class, and from what I remember, the title Great Expectations was as much an insult to his readers as it was a description of Pip. Because of the serial format, he was as dependent on the continuing good nature of his audience and advertisers as a network studio is, so much so that he rewrote the ending of the novel to better please them. In his original ending, Pip ends up alone but chastened; in the revised ending, he and Estella meet again at Satis (for “Enough”) House and there is “no shadow of parting” between them, presumably because Dickens suspected readers would want a happier conclusion for Pip.

So, whether Glee is better or worst than GE is not really the point. What’s interesting is that Fox was so sure this show would be a hit that it went to great pains to make sure it would be. The pilot was available all summer, and there are all kinds of extra goodies and clips that are not just promotional but fun to watch in their own right. And the characters are perfect: oblivious and insecure theatre girl, the nerd in the wheelchair, fastidious boy of questionable sexuality, warm-hearted jock, diva, nervous stuttering punk Asian girl. It’s like they had a bowl of adjectives and a bowl of nouns, and they just kept pulling them out and matching them until they had collected a motley but unutterably lovable crew of misfits that could never, in a thousand years, exist in the same place, but because they’re (loosely) based on types we’ve seen, we think they must be true. And then the show makes them sing songs so far from relevance that they can’t help but be adorable, but with skill, so they knock our socks off rather than ending as most glee clubs do, in earnest failure.

Fox has, of course, become very, very good at giving its audience “real” people, “relatable” people, people who are just like you and I but slightly or a lot more talented, which is the success of Idol and SYTYCD, or people who are despicable or stupid in many ways, to whom you can feel superior, which is what every other Fox reality show is about. And Glee is the eventual result of this formula, a formula that was successful a hundred and fifty years ago with Dickens, and works just as well when you add some Journey to it. (Better, in fact. Can you imagine a modern audience enjoying something so gross as a waxy old jilted woman whose moldy wedding dress catches on fire? Our taste for the Gothic seems to be limited mostly to Tim Burton movies nowadays, except for Sweeney Todd, which he didn’t write, and they are mostly harmless.)

This is not to say that I’m condescending to Glee, not at all. I liked reading Great Expectations, I liked watching Glee. I like watching America’s Next Top Model, for crying out loud. They’re well-made shows, they strike a chord, they’re good, actually, if predictable. What I want to know, what’s really bugging me while I’m watching the show, is why we, I mean as a people, generally, are interested in this story that is, at heart, sort of formulaic and banal and predictably “inspirational.”

In my office today, we were talking about the trend right now to remake old stories, like Pride and Predjudice and Zombies or Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, the old tales that we’re respinning with some new element, some new music or motif or cultural obsession. I’m not sure if we’ve adopted the idea that there simply isn’t anything new to say or write or sing about, so we just reapply old ideas to new faces (ie. Miss Serena May van der Woodsen Welland), or if that’s actually the only appropriate response to so much work and accumulated thought and ideas all available at a mouse click.

Mary Jo Salter published a great poem in last month’s Atlantic which seems appropriate to mention, simply because I think it’s puzzling out the same issue:

What is it about the forest

Why can’t we give it a rest?

All those writers taking

soulful walks in the woods:

good heavens, it’s been done.

She goes on to mention Dante writing about Virgil, Longfellow stealing from both, Nabokov knocking off (ha!) Proust, etc. To do anything else, to write in a tradition you don’t know intimately, would be writerly suicide. But this isn’t just a proving of her poetic credentials; she introduces and dismisses the greats in the same breath.  Even her meter and her rhyme are sporadic, unmannerly, scannable but following no coherent pattern. It’s poetry to break poetry, finishing with:

I’ve had my fill of Frost

proud again to be lost,

coming upon his fork

in the road for the millionth time,

or stumbling upon woodpiles

of somebody else’s work.

She stops short of showing us what that after-the-classics work looks like, what it means, for poetry anyway, to be “out of the woods.” She hasn’t left us a form to follow her out, which is perhaps the point, that there should be no form, just snatches of a rhyme here and there (Frost/lost) if you like, if it works, if it does what you want it to rhetorically, an almost hands-off, libertarian theory of literature and life in which you make your own way the best you can, hoping it’s enough.

From Great Expectations, chapter 8:

“Is that the name of this house, miss?”

“One of its names, boy.”

“It has more than one, then, miss?”

“One more. Its other name was Satis; which is Greek, or Latin, or Hebrew, or all three – or all one to me – for enough.”

“Enough House,” said I; “that’s a curious name, miss.”

“Yes,” she replied; “but it meant more than it said. It meant, when it was given, that whoever had this house, could want nothing else. They must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think. But don’t loiter, boy.”