Why yes, Virginia, I do plan to reuse this graphic every time I write about this show.
Glee has honestly been a little patchy, for me, since its stellar pilot and the equally stellar season opener. It’s never been less than enjoyable, but there were a couple of weeks there – episodes 3 and 4, to be precise – where I found myself wondering what I had been so excited about. I’m happy to say that with the most recent episode, the trend has reversed. And I’m even happier to say that I think I’ve figured out why, because otherwise I don’t know what I would write about this week. Episode six brought back an element of the pilot that they maintained in episode two, let slide in episodes three and four, and hopefully will never let slide again: the epic voice.
Voice in this context has nothing to do with the show’s music, which has been consistently fantastic all along. I’m using it here to describe a certain kind of writing. Basically when you sit down to tell someone a story, you have two options. Either you can try to present the story as events that are actually happening, while trying to make yourself as invisible as possible, or you can call as much attention to yourself as possible, while giving up on any attempt to convince people that story is actually taking place. The first of these techniques is dramatic. The second is epic.
I can't believe that I had to make my own image after searching for "Brad Pitt Achilles Epic Fail" on the Internet got me nowhere.
Why is it called the epic voice? Because epics do it all the freaking time, especially at their beginnings and endings where the speaker/poet calls explicit attention to his/her/its own performance. Fitzgerald’s translation of the Odyssey opens “Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story of that man skilled in all ways of contending…” The beginning of the Maureen Kovacs’ translation of the Gilgamesh Epic contains this remarkable passage: “Go up on the wall of Uruk and walk around, examine its foundation, inspect its brickwork thoroughly. Is not (even the core of) the brick sructure made of kiln-fired brick, and did not the Seven Sages themselves lay out its plans? …………. Find the copper tablet box, open the ….. of its lock of bronze, undo the fastening of its secret opening. Take and read out from the lapis lazuli tablet how Gilgamesh went through every hardship.” The Odyssey started as an oral tradition, and begins with an invocation of orality. Gilgamesh, in the surviving versions, is self consciously literary (and even architectural, the construction of the city being bound up in the tale itself). And even when they aren’t specifically explaining the process of storytelling, the authors of epics are constantly calling attention to themselves. One of the main villains of the Odyssey is named Melanthius. Melas being the Greek word for “dark,” this is about as subtle a villain name as Skeletor, although possibly a step or two up from Laird James McCullen Destro XXIV. When someone names a character like this, they do not want you to believe that this was actually somebody’s name. They want you to understand that, “look, I am right here telling you now that this Melanthius guy was really, really bad. And you can believe me, because I have a harp!”
What does all of this have to do with Glee? Think about those first two episodes, and the most recent one. The thing they have, which the other episodes lack, is narration, big long stretches of narration, where one character after another tells you about their past, about their situation, and their reaction to other people’s behavior, and really about anything at all. This is certainly a convenient way of letting us know which characters are the main ones, and more importantly a way to cram a huge amount of character exposition into a short amount of time. But most importantly of all, it creates the quintessentially epic scene of the storyteller in the act of telling a story. And this, more than anything else — even the music! — may be what makes Glee so much delirious fun.
What I don’t understand — and what I’d like some help from you in the comments trying to figure out — is why it works. So far I’m just figuring this out empirically. The first two episodes had this voiceover structure, and they hummed along. Episodes three and four didn’t have it (or had very little), and felt somehow… smaller. More ordinary. Less gleeful. Episode five didn’t have it either, but it had Kristen Chenoweth, who could fill an episode of C-SPAN with pep and vim if they gave her a musical number of two, and really the producers of Glee are freaking negligent if they aren’t out there right now doing whatever they have to do to get her as a full time cast member and so for that matter so are the producers of C-SPAN, but I digress. The point is that episode six, Chenowethless, was humming along just like the first two did. And it had voiceovers galore.
So what’s the deal? Let us not forget that, according to the rules that we all learned back in high-school English, this is bad writing. Show don’t tell, right? That’s rule ONE. And yet, episodes three and four showed. They showed us Puck feeling betrayed by Quinn’s indifference. They showed us Kurt’s pain and fear as he came out to his father. And both of these moments were great, really beautifully played and written scenes… but somehow the episodes as a whole felt stale.
Felt flat.
Felt familiar.
Felt like nothing so much as an updated remake of Dawson’s Creek with showtunes and dance routines, which is not what I want the show to be even though in a certain sense it is quite fundamentally what it is.
By contrast, episode six gives us Rachel narrating (i.e. telling us) her morning routine, and Sue writing in her journal (i.e. telling us) about her plans to destroy the Glee club, and while neither of these sequences is particularly brilliant in standard dramatic terms I found myself sitting there with a smile on my face thinking “Yes, this is it, this is what’s been missing!” I’d love for someone out there in OTI land to tell me why, because I’m mighty confused, myself.
Another thing that doesn’t make sense is that typically this kind of writing is excused for epics like the Odyssey because they are old (the “Homer wrote like that because he didn’t know any better” defense), and serious (the “weighty matters require leaden prose” defense), and crucial to national identity (okay, I don’t really even know the rationale behind this one, but I have heard it). And yet Glee is none of these things: it’s a brand new comedy which is very specifically about high school but also, I think, not at all targeted to high school students. What’s more, some of the best TV comedies in recent memory have been just slathered with the same kind of heavy-handed, attention grabbing, self-consciously artificial writing. I’m thinking here of the late lamented Pushing Daisies, the later, lamenteder Arrested Development, and How I Met Your Mother (which is still airing on Mondays on CBS so start watching it now while you still have a chance). All three have narrators, but there’s more to this than narration. The epic voice is also there in Arrested Development when Lucille Bluth starts to take off her blouse and the screen suddenly cuts to a title card reading “Footage not found.” It is there in How I Met Your Mother when Barney turns flat front to the camera and starts doodling in the air, John Madden style, to demonstrate the Vicky Mendoza diagonal on the Hot-Crazy scale. It is there in the hyper-rhetorical, hyper-articulate dialogue on Pushing Daisies – lines like “Then you haven’t been hugged properly. It’s like an emotional Heimlich. Someone puts their arms around you and they give you a squeeze and all your fear and anxiety come shooting out of your mouth in a big wet wad and you can breath again.” – which the actors deliver with a kind of breathless stumbling nonchalance as if they were themselves not quite sure where these mazes of verbiage were coming from, making it clear that the lines belonged to the writers first, the actors second, and the characters last or not at all. And it’s there in almost every aspect of the best episodes of Glee, from the improbably polished song performances, to the sugar-candy production design, to broad high school stereotypes, to — my favorite element, and one which sadly has gone MIA since the second episode — the way that all the incidental music was either performed by a non-diagetic acapella chorus or by a diagetic group of highschool musicians who just happened to be rehearsing somewhere in the background of the scene.
Any thoughts on this would be welcome. I may come back and revisit this topic in a couple of weeks when I have a few more episodes to deconstruct Certainly, now that that writing this has forced me to organize my thoughts a little, I’ll be watching this Wednesday’s episode with all this in mind, looking for the moments where the authors decide to show their hand. In fact, I suggest that we all do that. And on Wednesday, if you’re interested, we can recongregate right here in this comment thread to Overthink the heck out of it. See you then!
Still haven’t watched any Glee yet, but I did want to chime in and say that telling rather than showing has gotten an undeserved bad rap these days. It’s supposedly Rule One, as you say, yet all good books go for telling over showing at some points.
Slightly OT: I’m personally quite sick of all these rules for writing that seem to have developed over the past few decades that don’t apply to great works of literature. Saying, “Homer wrote that way because didn’t know any better” is ridiculous–nearly as ridiculous as one writing book I saw that rewrote the entire first chapter of The Great Gatsby. (The Great Gatsby also tells rather than shows early on, plus OMG so many adverbs and adjectives NOOOOOO!) Seriously, who rewrites The Great Gatsby? Is this generation of writing teachers seriously that arrogant?
Rule One should be, if it works, it works. If it doesn’t work, cut it. As you say, for whatever reason, in Glee, it works.
I think that you’re missing another important commonality among the episodes you singled out. Episodes 1, 2, and 6 are unified by being episodes in which Will Schuester’s character is focused, primarily, on Glee club (5 shares this to some extent, but is importantly different in that Schuester consciously engages in somewhat selfish, and morally questionable behavior to try and make Glee successful).
The pilot set up Schuester’s fundamental project and motivation: restoring Glee club to its former glory as a means of combatting the apathy and lethargy of uninspired high school students.
I understand wanting to showcase the talented performances of the cast, but plotlines like Acafellas are simply at odds with Schuester’s character. To do a plotline about his unfulfilled hopes of stardom would require much slower pacing, and a subtler build-up, until it became apparent that he couldn’t give Glee his full dedication unless he found out whether he could make it as a performer, and not just an instructor (I have similar feelings about the pacing of the Kurt-Mercedes storyline. The musical number wasn’t the problem, it just lacked any sort of subtlety in the buildup.
To answer you actual question though, I think the reason the consciously artificial voiceovers work is that, since they break the fourth wall to some extent, they remind us that what we are watching is in fact a story, and that makes it easier to overlook contrivances.
Contrivance is hard to forgive in drama that is played straight, but it is much easier to stomach if it is used in the subversion of an established trope. Arrested development provides great examples (mistaken identity with an identical twin, the ‘mystery’ of buster’s paternity, etc.).
Outside of cartoons, it is hard to sell emotional reactions without playing them straight. For Kurt’s coming out to his dad to work, the emotions have to be realistic. But these melodramatic plotlines (especially since they are all co-occurring) are so over the top that they can’t be played straight, they need to be subverted. It’s not that the show couldn’t try to play them straight, but doing so is at odds with the almost parodied 2-dimensionality of some characters.
Take Schuester’s naive outreach, Puck’s aggression, or Quinn’s in-crowd elitism. These characters all began as 2-dimensional stereotypes. But there is a difference between a story that tries seriously express the message that there is depth to their personalities (where that is the goal of a given plotline), and one that uses that now-familiar plotline for some other purposes. Glee isn’t subverting the stereotypes of the dumb jock, the mean cheerleader, and the compassionate teacher, as much as it is subverting the stereotypes of the deeper-than-you’d-think jock, the mean-because-she-is-insecure cheerleader, and the naive-optimist-who-winds-up-being-right. These second order subversions are more commentary on storytelling than on the characters, and that’s why the narration works (just as, for instance, HIMYM is a subversion of shows like Friends, or Desperate Housewives is a subversion of Soap Operas).
My last comment: It is, essentially, a lot like the difference between Studio 60, and 30 Rock.
Oh, I lied. One more thing:
I also wanted to say that Glee works better when the character’s attitudes infect the musical performances (for instance, in episode 6, where the choice of mashing up “It’s my Life” and “Confessions” is clearly a comment on/reflection of Finn’s attitudes about Quinn’s pregnancy, but the fact that a song is being performed is unrelated (Schuester decided to have a mash-up contest), rather than when the performance itself is a manifestation of the character’s attitudes (as with Mercedes and the car). Obviously, this isn’t a black and white distinction (Rachel’s melancholy performance of “Take a Bow” straddles this line).
Oh, and one more thing: I may just give up on the show outright if they don’t give Tina (a) some lines, and (b) her own subplots.
With you on that last one, Lewis. Well, I probably won’t actually give up on the show. But why introduce the character at all if you’re not going to do anything with her?
I kind of like the fact that, seemingly alone out of the main characters, she has a quiet personality, and doesn’t mind singing backup or taking a hit for the good of the chorus. But just because the character is kind of a doormat doesn’t mean that the writers should ignore her too. I dunno. I’m hoping that they’re going for some kind of ugly-duckling transformation arc with her, and that the actress is secretly a much, much better singer than she has so far let on. But I’m not going to hold my breath.
Mlawski: It would actually be kind of a fun exercise to write two versions of some famous story, one where you only show and never tell, and one where you only tell and never show. Both would be pretty awful, probably.
Normal high-school life is boring. What’s exciting is how everyone reacts to what goes on. And who would rather see how someone reacts than read about that person’s thoughts in a diary.
Anyone who has been a part of high school knows the common school problems. We don’t need to see more of those. Instead, we want to see into the minds of the people we are not.
As a high-schooler myself, I’m curious about the thoughts of my teachers, friends, pretty much everybody. I see what happens at school everyday. When I watch Glee, I don’t want to do what I do at school everyday, observe. I want to know how other people think, because that’s something I don’t get at school.
Re: Tina- Again, and this may be a terrible cop-out, but in the episode where she almost got Rachel’s solo, there is a bit where Sheuster says something like, “You stutter less when you feel confident,” or something like that. In other words, she doesn’t talk because she’s afraid she’ll stutter, but she stutters because she’s afraid, etc. Not condoning this on behalf of the writers, but that seems to be their excuse so far. What about the kid in the wheelchair? He hasn’t had his own plot, either.
Re: Narration- Perhaps the sheer absurdity of the whole premise is why narration works, and works better than non-narration. It ties together all of the ridiculous individual nuggets with a thread of almost derisory (toward the “teen soap” genre, perhaps) continuity that makes them sensical. It sets up a crazy context that sort of gives a pass to the crazy content.
The thing about the dramatic mode that makes it a little silly in this context is the way it is in direct conflict with itself: the dramatic mode works best with emotional naturalism and visual realism, yet those things are impossible in a show about high schoolers. A real high school is not entertaining. Teachers are sad, boring people. Students are stupid, self-obsessed and terrified of doing anything worth watching. A realistic portrayal of high school, as in Fred Wiseman’s documentary High School, is terrifying. Wiseman was the king of show-don’t-tell, and his movies are nightmares. The reason any of us have positive associations with high school is that we were able to get through it with almost nothing important or interesting happening.
I think part of the problem with “Show, don’t tell” is that different media have different rules. “Show, don’t tell” comes from the world of literature, where the biggest temptation that can lead an inexperienced writer down the path to boring writing is over-narrating. Any time where you have people speaking it’s a different story (I believe anyways). People like to hear a narrative from another person, it’s basically what people do when they get together and share stories. You rarely find even the best storytellers filling in too many details when telling a story (why this is, I don’t know, maybe because you can’t linger over the details of spoken words). This is especially true in video because you are automatically showing, just by virtue of having a video of what people are doing, where, etc.
But it’s also true that all rules are made to be broken :)
@MaxPolun: I see what you’re saying, but isn’t reading narration exactly the same thing as listening to a person tell a story? As Stokes said in his article above, you can have narration that is “invisible” (or nearly so), and you can have narration that draws attention to the fact that a story is being told. A story narrated by a first-person narrator (e.g. Gossip Girl, the Lemony Snicket books) is generally going to be of the latter kind, and it will probably do a fair bit of telling rather than showing. And that’s okay, when it works.
My feeling is this “show don’t tell” stuff came about because readers these days expect books to be like movies and TV. The fact is, they’re different media. They can (and I’d argue, should) do different things. To me, one of the best parts of a book is that you can get into a character’s head through the power of narration. It’s like reading someone’s diary, which I personally find awesome. That’s different from watching a TV show or movie, which is more like real life in that you, the audience member, are not privy to any inner thoughts and feelings and must figure them out based on (usually rather obvious) physical clues.
Telling rather than showing is also good for shortening the length of your book/movie/TV show/whatever. Again, I can’t speak about Glee, but I can speak about Arrested Development. If the show didn’t have a narrator, it would have been much more difficult to fit so many plot points into every single episode. The “telling” narrator was able to condense the plot, removing the need for boring expository dialogue, thus leaving time for moar funnies.
Jordan, mind if I drop a few random observations about Glee into your thread?
1. Amen on the Tina thing. I am getting a little annoyed at how Finn and Rachel get ALL the solos. The Glee Club is really the two of them, and a bunch of backup singers. I understand they’re the stars of the show, and they’ll always to the lion’s share of the singing. But people, does anyone NOT want to see Kurt have his moment in the spotlight?
One of the big themes of Glee is supposedly the need to put aside egos and work together. And yet, that doesn’t come out in the performances. Rachel quit because she wanted to always be the star. Has anything changed since she came back? I want to see Rachel HELPING Tina on her big West Side Story number. Trying to make her friends better singers.
Look, I was in a bunch of musicals and choirs. There’s always someone who’s head and shoulders a better singer than everybody else. But that doesn’t mean that no one else should get their chance to shine.
2. So, um, did Kurt quit the football team? Because last time we heard about it, he was the star kicker. Now when we see football practice, he’s definitely not there. Are they just never going to mention that again, like that episode never happened?
3. Look people, I really want to suspend disbelief. But I just can’t buy that Terri can fake this pregnancy for nine months, and her husband never figures it out. He never once sees her without a shirt on, or even touches the middle of her body, in nine MONTHS of sharing the same bed? Even if they’re on the outs and not having sex, I still say it’s very very hard to buy.
I should probably mention that I’m defending telling much more than I usually would because I just finished reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s YA novel, Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, which is almost all telling and very little showing. It’s a lovely little book. The fact that the protagonist was telling the readers how he felt, why he was doing what he was doing, and so on took some getting used to, but it allowed LeGuin to create a psychologically-nuanced main character in only 130 pages. That’s not to say you can’t do so in a movie, book, or TV show that relies mostly on showing, of course. It just takes longer.
If you were to write something that was all showing and no telling, the characters would have to act in obvious, cliched ways. For example, character X is angry, so he punches someone. That’s an simple, easy way to show a simple emotion: violent anger. The audience sees violence and thinks, “Aha, he’s angry.” No telling required.
But if you want to show that character Y is angry because he remembers something embarrassing that happened to him as a child and now he’s reacting by retreating into himself, it requires a lengthy flashback, a subtler actor who can show anger without violence, and probably a scene of expository dialogue (which is also a form of “telling,” by the way) in which someone explains that he’s the kind of guy who retreats into himself rather than punching others when he’s angry. This type of nuanced character building takes a lot longer to achieve if you want to show it rather than just tell it. But when a writer takes the time to build a more complex character in this way, it can work incredibly well. Which is probably why I like Lost so much, by the way :)
I’m gonna go out on a limb here and say that the reason the narration works here, and more specifically, works *better* than the show without it, is because the narration IS the “showing.”
That is, the show actually is following the “show, don’t tell” precept.
This would not be the case, I don’t think, if there were a single, 3rd person (uninvolved) narrative voice. However, through the narration as done in Glee – different characters, different perspectives – we gain the illusion of intimacy. We connect with the characters; we are “shown” the inner workings of their mind.
In this medium and genre, very particularly, the filmmaking is “telling” the story. The camera angles, scene set-ups, and even dialogue are all in the writers/directors’ voices. When that is all we have, we feel as though we’re being “told” a story. When the characters’ narration kicks in, we are being “shown” their point of view, whereas their actions and expressions in the context of the plot are merely the creators “telling” us.
This would not be true in a more realistic genre. Realism, in television, hinges on the audience feeling as though they are involved in the action. If, during an episode of Lost, we suddenly were treated to Jack’s internal monologue, it would feel artificial, inorganic. It would take us out of the moment. Television drama is all about exploiting the moment.
In the surreal world of Glee, however, there is never any doubt that we are external to the events shown.
On Lost, the audience is drawn in by the question of “what if it were me?” and “what would I do in that situation?” The characters resonate because they have understandable motivations, and are like us. That’s how we are drawn in. On Glee, the characters exist, as was mentioned elsewhere, to lampoon very specific caricatures. Not only are the caricatures themselves not particularly easy to relate to (which is why they’re worth lampooning) but, in an effort to subvert specific personality elements, the resulting characters are even less so. Their choices are already often inorganic, often stilted and awkward. The only way to make us understand them, instead of just being *told* a story about them, is by *showing* us what they are truly like by exposing the inner workings of their minds.
This was a really fun comment thread to come back and read. First, as promised (if a day late), my thoughts on the most recent episode. I thought it was pretty fantastic. And alas for my theory, it had only a snippet or two of narration. But like the Kristen Chenoweth episode, there were very specific reasons why it worked. Those were
1: it was a very Jane Lynch heavy episode, and she is astonishingly good in this role. I love me some Jane Lynch.
2: the inspired decision to have Finn and Rachel’s big duet here use basically the same structure and camera setup as Rachel’s Take A Bow number from a few episodes back, only this time it’s Finn and Rachel as a couple with Quinn staring at them heartbroken from the background. I love me some formalism.
So I still stand by my theory for the meantime. There are certainly other ways for them to do an excellent episode, but I’m hoping tell-don’t-show will be their bread and butter.
@Genevieve, on the idea that the narration is showing, not telling: This is a fascinating idea, but I’m not sure I buy it. You are definitely %100 right that the filmmaking devices – camera angles, editing, what have you – are a big part of the authorial “voice” of film and television. But I want to say that for the most part, the narrated sections are *more* ostentatious about their camera angles, editing, etc. than the rest of the show is.
@Matt: while you and I will probably end up killing eachother in a duel over this show some day, I do agree with you about point one. I want to hear the other people sing more. Well, Mercedes has had a couple of really nice moments now, especially the one from last night. But what about the rest of them?
@Lewis, in re whether the musical numbers are performances infected by the characters’ moods, or simply expressions of their moods like in a normal musical: for the most part, I agree with you, although my favorite favorites are the ones that kind of tread (or play hopscotch with) the boundary. I did really like Quinn’s “Keep Me Hanging On” number last night though. Not necessarily sure why.
Remember when they had a super-restricted listed of songs they could sing? What ever happened to that?
@Lewis – THANK YOU. That’s exactly my issue with the show. They introduce things, like, “From now on, you have highly limited song choices.” And then they seem to forget they ever happened. (Will said the boys’ Bon Jovi-Usher mashup could be their opener in the competition. I promise you, My Confessions was not on that approved list.)
Hm, Belinkie, to relate to the other thread about Glee and what you said, I agree there are probably some things the writers could and should be more careful about. Introducing something simply for immediate comedic/dramatic effect and then forgetting about it is not okay.
I actually saw “Keep Holding On” quite differently, Stokes. In MY most humble opinion (ahemhemhem), it’s no coincidence that Quinn sang “Keep Me Hanging On” earlier and then they all sang “Keep Holding On” together at the end. “Keep Holding On” was a response. There were moments where Finn was singing to QUINN, and even more where Rachel was. Quinn definitely looked like she was crying most of the time, and even seemed to stop mid-sentence a bit because she was choked up, but the feel I got from the song was that Rachel and Finn made a pact to help Quinn through and then made it with her. Especially because of that moment in the end where Finn grabs hands with both girls- he’s staring at Quinn for most of it. Yeah, there were a few moments where Finn and Rachel were walking, windswept, through the halls, but they were contrasted with parts on the stage where the two of them were facing Quinn and singing the song’s title line to her. To be totally forthcoming, I actually started to get watery-eyed watching it (and I’ve watched it a few extra times, still a little choked up…), but that’s beside the point. What I’m getting at is I’m really intrigued at where this triangle is going, because the way Rachel was singing to Quinn suggests she isn’t going to be nice just because she wants to impress Finn more, but because it’s the right thing to do. I’d love to see the two girls ally themselves and turn on him over something as a way of demonstrating some solidarity between them. I wouldn’t want the anti-Finn aspect to stay the rest of the series, but the introduction and then continuation of a bond between Quinn and Rachel would be a nice touch and show development in both girls: Quinn because she would have to become a better person in order to accept Rachel, and Rachel because she would be seeing Quinn as her own individual and not as a means of impressing Finn. And I suppose it wouldn’t even necessarily have to be an anti-Finn thing between them, too. An alliance against Sylvester would be pretty nice, since she threw Quinn under the bus and Rachel totally called her on it TO QUINN before it happened. I can see a great scene with Quinn admitting Rachel was right and Rachel getting that cute look of inspiration on her face and saying she knows exactly what they can do, etc.