Oh well. Can't win 'em all, can you?
Glee has always been a show with an identity crisis. Last week, I thought maybe they had figured out the balance between being outrageous and being a down to earth show about people in a singing club. It was absolutely a step in the right direction, with some great guest stars and storylines to boot. Excuse the pun, but I thought this might have been a 'New Direction' for the show.
Then comes along 'Brittany/Britney', an episode of television so self-indulgent, I couldn't take it seriously. I suppose you could argue that you're not meant to take it seriously, but when the show can achieve things like we saw in 'Wheels', or even last week's 'Audition', it just disappoints me that Ryan Murphy and company don't mind settling for what was nothing more than a collection of music video homages.
It felt like they were just looking for an excuse to hobble together a few Britney Spears songs (and I suppose this is where the argument against merchandising can be formed) to sell loads of copies of an EP. It's particularly annoying because I actually quite liked the music and will probably still buy it, but I much prefer it when the musical numbers compliment the story that's being told. Here, the Britney fantasies were quite literally disconnected from reality and I wasn't invested in it at all, except to an extent the performance of 'Stronger', because that tied in with Artie's B-story of wanting to win Tina back.
And it's certainly not the fault of the cast, in particular Heather Morris. She's a great dancer and she got to showcase a lot of that. The 'Brittany is stupid' schtick wore a little thin, though. Brittany lines should be there to compliment a scene, not be the focus of it, and it doesn't work when the main point of the scene is for Morris to spout Brittany-isms. John Stamos was fine as the dentist, and had some perfectly okay scenes with Will where they discussed Emma and their little triangle. I very much enjoyed Matthew Morrison in this episode, as he struggled to deal with all the stresses in his life.
But really, this episode was so 'meh' for me that I don't even really feel bothered to talk about the other points of the episode that didn't set me alight, including Rachel's feelings of inadequacy, a complete re-hash of the 'Push It' scene from Season 1, Jacob masturbating in the library, and Kurt acting like a whiny brat because he couldn't sing Britney Spears songs. Just, 'meh'.
Hopefully this is just a hiccup, and not an indication of what the rest of the season will be like.
What did everyone else think?
