IT'S A STRAIGHT FLUSH--IT'S LIKE, UNBEATABLE: By Todd VanDerWerff's estimate, Glee did something unusual last night--achieving "rummy" for the season--meaning that by his grading scale, it's had an episode hitting every letter grade from A to F during the course of the season. I do think VanDerWerff was overly generous in giving an "A" to the second half of last night's double episode for the block (and overly punishing in giving an "F" to "Choke," which had problems in half the story, but also featured Chris Colfer's dynamite "Not The Boy Next Door"), but I think he nails the joy and the central problem with the show right there--it's so wildly inconsistent in tone and quality that you never know what you're going to get.
Indeed, in the span of two hours last night, we got wacky (and surprisingly well-performed all around) body swap hijinks, a bizarrely meta set of "previouslies," random celebrity cameos, and authentic personal and emotional milestones for a bunch of characters. That's what makes Glee hard to stop watching--even as it hits nadirs, which it does with a fair degree of regularity, it can, when it works, work in a way no other show does. I'll almost certainly be giving it up next season (the timeslot against Office/Parks and Rec, Grey's, Person of Interest, and whatever the CW wants to give a Vampire Diaries leadin to is murderous, and the streaming delay problematic), but I'll do so with a bit of regret.
