'Glee' Finale: A Sweetheart to the Very End

Watching Glee’s two-hour finale, I realized I had forgotten how sweet-hearted this show could be. When it debuted in 2009, I had put Glee’s first season in my year-end Top 10, but as the series proceeded, the show became repetitious and prone to grand-standing, and as for the show’s valorization of dreadful hits by the likes of REO Speedwagon, Night Ranger, Styx, Foreigner, and — well, the show frequently wasn’t for me. I always loved its love for Britney Spears, though.

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The two-hour finale was, as I said, awfully sweet, but I mean that mostly as a compliment.

Please note: Spoilers ahead.

The night began in 2009 with what superhero comics call the origin stories of all the principal players, went to the present day to declare that “glee is about opening yourself to joy” (hear, hear), and then made a few time-space zig-zags, from 2020 (Jeb Bush wins reelection for a second term and Jane Lynch’s Sue Sylvester is Vice President) to 2025 (Lea Michele’s Rachel is pregnant, a surrogate for the child Chris Colfer’s Curt and Darren Criss’s Blaine wanted, and, oh yeah, wins a Tony Award), then back to 2020 for the dedication of the “Finn Hudson Auditorium” (one of numerous nice salutes to the late Cory Monteith), and a rousing all-cast-member final performance, of “I Lived.” As I said, any show that prizes music such as the stuff that emanated from an act like OneRepublic loses me.

Which is not to say that I don’t recognize what creators Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan accomplished here. They certainly revived the musical for television; the way the performances were staged and filmed was often novel and inventive. Glee offered network television’s most celebratory depictions of LGBTQ lives.

But Glee’s scripts were also as often as not heavy-handed and obvious, larded with corny jokes. Any given character’s motivation could do a 180 in the space of a commercial break. It took all of Lynch’s skill to keep Sue from becoming either a monster or, in the finale, an unbelievable goody-goody. And I had written “insufferable” next to Michele’s embodiment of Rachel, wondered briefly whether that might be a tad harsh, and then as I watched the finale noticed that my editor had tweeted the word “insufferable,” so: Insufferable it is. 

The second hour of the finale was titled “Dreams Come True,” and Glee went out like a fairy tale, granting everyone in the main cast her or his wish. At a time when so much highly esteemed television equates excellence with darkness, cynicism, violence, and despair, there’s something to be said for sweetness and light. Glee was a sweet-hearted show.