Challenge of the "Glee"-bots!
Hey, Gang! It's really me. I'm not dead. My wife and I have been busy moving into a new house, so I'm a little behind on movie reviews; with any luck--and a lot of sleep--I should have a couple new pieces up this week.
Did anyone else watch American Idol last night? I did, for two reasons. First, it was "Elvis Night", and I just knew someone would butcher my favorite song from The King, "Suspicious Minds"; here's a tip, Siobhan: that's not the kind of song one smiles through while singing; It's a bummer tune, and you looked like an idiot--an idiot who can't sing.
The second reason I watched was because I noticed that much of the cast of the hit Fox TV series Glee was sitting in the front row of the audience, right behind the judges! I'm a Gleek, I admit it. It's a solid show with some great music (though, honestly, I've been waiting since last May 19th for an episode that had the perfect balance of comedy and emotional honesty as the pilot--there's a reason their version of "Don't Stop Believin'" is a hit).
Keep in mind, I dind't see the cast's appearance on Oprah last week (we got new cable boxes during the move, so we lost a ton of awful television), but I did read the Glee cover story in the new Rolling Stone. I found the article to be rather catty and not incredibly well-written. But watching Idol last night, the article's thesis struck me: the Glee cast may well be an army of perfectly engineered entertainment robots.
Did you notice how they all sat in their seats, staring blankly into the middle distance until some outside force (usually Ryan Seacrest) either addressed one of them or said something that riled the audience? They were like human motion detectors, and it creeped me the fuck out. I was a big fan of Matthew Morrison, who plays Mr. Shuester on the show--until last night. With his hipster hat and dour expression, he looked not like an exuberant showman, but rather like R. Crumb at a shopping mall--so bewildered by everything around him that he shut down until called upon to do something famous-y.
Cory Monteith (Finn on Glee) looked particularly lost; at the punchline of some lewd joke, he turned his head from side to side, as if the sensor that explains why things are funny had shorted out and he couldn't decide whether to laugh or melt the audience with his Lockheed-designed whitened-teeth lasers. I feared for the safety of everyone in the Idol audience last night; not the first emotion I thought of when thinking to myself, "Hey, it's the Glee kids!"
What's the point of this screed? Don't know. I haven't written anything in awhile and I'm getting cagey. But, hey, what's the Internet for, if not to serve as a launching pad for wild speculation and off-base celebrity gossip?
Maybe I'll ditch my evil-Glee-robots theory after I see the mid-season opener tomorrow night--we're holding out to watch it with friends. I hope I forget about that Rolling Stone thing, too, 'cause I'd like to believe that the show's cast is full of regular people who love to act and sing. But I suspect they're all robots, and until I'm proven wrong, I'll hold onto that feeling.