Glee: "The Sue Sylvester Shuffle"

Once I get a tally of how many Super Bowl reference there were in tonight's episode, I will be able to give you a review, after the jump....

I have never been a fan of Super Bowl episodes of television. Beyond the fact that I have to watch some portion of a football game lest I miss the opening minutes of a favorite television show, but there is this expectation that shows can never live up, this idea that any episode that follows such a major cultural event must be AMAZING.

Tonight, prior to the beginning of the start of Glee's special episode, we were treated to many differing expectations. All of the promos made this episode out to be ridiculous, especially the Chevy based ad which appears to recycle a plot point from season one's “Mattress.” Yet the Super Bowl this year – between the mostly low key game, the underwhelming commercials, and the horrible halftime show – all seemed to be converging in order to lower audience expectations for the Glee follow up.

I bring all of this up because one's state of mind going into any episode of television will inherently inform, to some degree, their television experience. Yet Glee seemed to be aware of this dynamic, and tried to have it both ways; it tried both the play into the Super Bowl hype, and play it low key so as to avoid missing the high target they were aiming for. The result was a fairly solid episode, but one with some distracting elements of the fringes.

For a good portion of it's running time tonight, Glee wasn't itself. And I mean this in a good way, because I enjoyed it. Is seemed to stick to mainly one storyline, that of the football team and the Glee club being thrown together in order to foster harmony in these organizations and the school in general. Of the idea of this plot was a bit ridiculous, but this is Glee, so you just kinda have to go with it. The larger implications – that the show can hopefully move past these repeated “the glee kids are outcasts” that have been getting old for a while now. 

Or at least that was the hope. Concurrent with this was the continuation of Kurt/Karofsky plot, the only serialization in tonight's episode. I was never a plan of this subplot – having Kurt leave the glee club feels like manufactured drama, and Karofsky being in the closet just seems hacky. I was hoping that tonight's episode was going to wrap all of this up, and thus move up past this creatively bankrupt chapter in Glee's history. But of course it didn't, and so that leaves the impression that this entire episode was a waste on that front.

And speaking of waste, the Sue plot – or is it more like a runner? - was a similar waste of airspace, as it was dropped about a third of the way into the episode, and it mostly seem to exist in order to manufacture drama in the main glee club/football plot. I didn't have much of a problem with this, but just dropping it all together until the last five minutes just highlights how flimsy it really was.

At the core of tonight's episode was the issue of identity, something that the show has covered many times before, but never as subtly as they did here. (Of the subtly here was relative.) We had kids trying to figure out just who they really are, and where they need to be in order to be truly happy. The subject itself wasn't that ripe with ideas, but it did something that we haven't seen in Glee in quite a while (if at all); it gave the show an overarching theme, and it kept them main plots from feeling so scatter shot from one another. 

What did everybody else think?

Additional Thoughts:

“Maybe you're think its cooler when I go all 'Tik-Tok' on your face.” So bad, it made me laugh

“Is it the new raccoon hormones my doctor gave me? Maybe.”

“Hey, we used to be best friends...” Man, Glee does not know how to start scenes

“I don't want to die yet...at least not until One Tree Hill gets canceled.”

“I'm torn.” “I'm not.” “I'm Brittany.”