Ever since it was announced that Naya Rivera had gone missing, and then revealed that she had tragically drowned saving her son, I have found myself thinking a lot about that show that I used to watch in high school. What I liked about it, but also what I disliked and why I eventually stopped watching it.
One thing I often find myself criticizing in this show is both its lack of continuity and the fact that certain things seem to keep happening. For instance, Quinn, my favorite character, gets pregnant in season 1 and through this she learns several things: the most important thing in the world is you and not men, popularity is not what matters the most, bigotry is harmful, real friends are those who stick with you through it all and maybe she didn’t love her boyfriend Finn all that much. Yet, season 2 happens and with it we see Quinn rejoining the Cheerios, turning into a bitch once again, and resuming her relationship with Finn in an extremely unbelievable twist. And don’t get me started on seasons 3, 4 and 5! That’s when I look at my screen and think “how can I care about you people?”, an issue I have also had with other shows like Pretty Little Liars or The 100.
Shows whose writers did not seem to have a specific plan of what would happen next, except maybe for the first few seasons, and, it seems, found themselves renewed and completely out of ideas. They thus resorted to incredibly implausible plot twists to try and keep the show entertaining, at the risk of contradicting themselves and destroying their core meaning or that of their characters. They kept stitching each new season, each new storyline, to the quilt, turning it into increasingly incoherent patchwork.
This is what the YouTuber Passion of the Nerd would call plot-driven episodes, as opposed to character-driven ones. It is when things happen because the writers want or need them to, and not because of the characters’ personalities and histories. The problem with plot-driven episodes is that they make it harder to relate, to care, about the characters. On the contrary, character-driven episodes deepen our relationship with them and help making them believable.
The problem with Glee was that Brittany’s stupidity fluctuated between episodes, that Sam had dated more than half of the girls of the show, that Sue kept turning nice and then mean again, and, most of all, that the characters rarely seemed to learn from their mistakes because they were, more often than not, already forgotten by the next episode.
Apart from mere continuity, it is the idea that the characters’ actions will have lingering consequences that gives weight to their feelings and experiences, that makes them feel real. It is the fact that the trauma will come back, that they’ll remember that joke from two years ago, that they’ll mention that long-gone and/or background character that makes us care about what happens to them. Their lives are connected to the time and space continuum. They may go through changing experiences and evolve, but, at core, they remain the same people. And, as we get to know them, they become like friends, we can hear their voices, characteristic and individual, sing their story; and we also notice when they sound off/out-of-tune. Something that, I believe, Joss Whedon (among others) does incredibly well. He’s also proven that it is possible to remain true to your characters while also creating a lot of suspense and providing new perspectives and new ways of doing things.
You never know who will live or die in his shows and to say that the viewer is often taken by surprise would be a huge understatement. But the characters’ actions (often) make sense and the events of previous seasons are as relevant to them as they are to us. On the other hand, though Glee tried to surprise me, it never quite could. I always knew that Rachel would end up becoming a big Broadway star, that Kurt and Blaine would end up together despite everything that happened between them, that Emma and Will would get married and have children even though their relationship is toxic in many ways. In an incredibly twisted way, the only time when Glee did something that was genuinely surprising and that rang true was after the death of Cory Monteith. Only then was it forced to do something different. It is a sad truth that it took a cast member dying for them to give up on their plan to have Rachel and Finn marry after all the bad stuff they had gone through. This time, they had to find a backup plan, which made things slightly less predictable. Because, in the end, the lack of continuity only made the show, paradoxically, more predictable. If the characters are ready to forget all mistakes and never really mature, then what could keep me from expecting the end to look like exactly what I had in mind from the first episode?
This predictability may be comforting for some people, but this is not what real life is like. And this is why these characters remain incredibly superficial for me. So why keep watching if I can find something better?
Journal de Pensées 