There we were, crying on Twitter with TV Guide 's Damian Holbrook. He said, "I need to be sedated after this #gleegoodbye." We responded, "*hands over hankies* *tries to stop sobbing*." Holbrook replied, "I'm wasted from that finale." To which we responded, "Seriously. I'm glad my deadline isn't til morning. I can barely see. They really brought it. This is what we fell in love with."
Glee has had its ups and downs since its debut on May 19, 2009, when Ryan Murphy first took us to McKinley High and returned us to the years many of us hated �" high school. When Glee was "on," it was The Best Show Ever. When it wasn't, we still couldn't help loving it. We just didn't love it as much. We have the cast albums. We have the Christmas albums. We have the memories. Oh, do we have the memories.
But on the March 20 two-hour series finale, we loved Glee. Loved. It. This was the reunion that made us forget every bad moment of the past two seasons that were more down than up, once so many of our faves graduated from McKinley High and moved to New York or simply off the Glee canvas. We loved it so much we started crying about 12 minutes in, and didn't stop until way after the two hours of sentimental moments that made us fall in love with Kurt and Rachel and Finn and Santana (Oh, Santana.) and Mercedes and Unique and Becky and Artie and Mr. Schuester and even Sue were over.
For anyone gay or lesbian, bi or trans, Glee was a watershed show. It was our show. It was about our people and everything we went through in those years of misery. (We were actually expelled from our all-girls high school for being a lesbian, so Glee always resonated deeply for us.)
Glee was the show that opened the door to what happens to us in those years �" how it shapes us and can even destroy us. What Murphy did was re-create the atmosphere of high school, where homophobia is entrenched and self-loathing can easily take hold of us, eating away from the inside.
Glee was often West Side Story-as-dramedy: nobody died, but plenty of people got hurt, and the Cheerios and the Gleeks were the stand-ins for the Sharks and the Jets. Without the mitigating force of Mr. Schuester (Matthew Morrison), the teacher we all needed and the one most of us never got (he's the guy you'd be thanking in your Oscars-Tonys-Emmys-Grammys acceptance speech), McKinley High would have been Lord of the Flies. Mr. Schuester gathered the misfit toys together and gave them their own island of safety and security and sense-of-self. Mr. Schuester, thank you for everything. You were �" are �" the best.
The trope for the finale was past and future: where Glee was in 2009, and where the Gleeks will be five years from now. Is it a happy ending? You'll have to watch to be sure. (And really �" if you missed it, you must go watch it, on Fox, on Hulu, the entire final season on Netflix.) But we can tell you that there are some true surprises that are, well, great. (And 2020 seems like a long time from now, but when you see Glee, not so much.)
There were many "best" moments in the series finale, but the best thing of all was seeing everyone and going back in time, and oh �" the music. When we saw the number that put Glee on the musical map, "Don't Stop Believin'" with the entire Gleek cast, yes, we cried. (Watch it here, we defy you not to sob: www.youtube.com/watch?v=7vN2mkeCjlw.)
And then there was Kurt's (Chris Colfer) and Rachel's (Lea Michele) first real bonding moment (did they really say Mr. Schuester looked like an "old Justin Timberlake?") Oh, how young they were! That baby face of Kurt's (Colfer was just 18 when Glee started, and looked like he was 12) �" so young, so gay, so in need of support.
And what about Kurt and his dad �" his wonderful, supportive, anything-for-my-sons dad? Kurt and Rachel have always been the core of Glee, and their individual emotional rollercoasters have been the parallel lines that have consistently run through the show. Rachel and her gay dads, Kurt and his loving, "I'll fight to the death for your right to love whoever you want" dad.
But Kurt spent a lot of his growing up on Glee feeling at odds with everything, including himself and his own gayness. Suicidality was a theme on Glee �" not everyone was happy and shiny. There were many students at McKinley who struggled to stay alive. And Kurt was among them. But he got the support he needed and became, in the finale, the poster gay for "it gets better."
Not everyone made it, of course. There was real-life tragedy with Glee, like Cory Monteith (Finn), the real-life partner of Lea Michele (Rachel), dying of an overdose in 2013. There was a tribute to him/Finn. And it was a five-hankie event.
Another sob-your-eyes-out was Rachel giving her goodbye performance, singing, "This Time." Oh those lyrics. Oh that voice. We have no clue how she managed to get through that without breaking down. Because we couldn't. (The song was written by Darren Criss, who plays Kurt's partner, Blaine.)
In the future �" the one where Kurt and Blaine, who have been through so much, are still together �" Rachel is carrying their baby for them, remembering her own gay dads and how much she meant to them.
Rachel also finally gets that Tony, because she was always the true musical star of Glee. So remember what we said about whom you thank in your speech? Yeah, she does. Mr. Schuester. Sobs all around. She reminds us of what he's always said, "Being part of something special doesn't make you special, something is special because you are part of it."
And that, as they always said every week, is what you missed on Glee. It was special, it was memorable, it was everything a series finale should be and rarely is. Everyone was there. Glee brought it. Got us right where we live. Because Glee was always, always, our show, with our people. The series finale left us with that specialness. TV doesn't do that often. But when it does �" oh. Pass the tissues and make way for the full-on ugly cry.
Empire building
Fox had quite the week with finales. Glee was a showstopper, but Fox's 2015 surprise (not to us, but apparently to everyone else) hit Empire tore it up with its two-hour
season finale. Wow, this show is good. Mega good. We admit we were prepped to love it because of Lee Daniels, who is from our hometown, Philly, and who is gay and black and awesomely good at putting the whole black community on the canvas, not just the white-people version of blacks. Daniels is also good at putting real-life gay on the screen. And powerhouse women. Like Cookie Lyon (Taraji P. Henson).
Empire has so much going for it. It's straight-up soap drama of the highest order. But it's also a show where white people are utterly peripheral and blacks own the entire hour. It's got the best music ever. It's got amazing �" truly amazing �" actors. Three Oscar nominees in Henson, Terrence Howard (Lucious Lyon) and Gabourey Sidibe (Becky), but also some stand-out performances by Trai Byers as Andre Lyon, Jussie Smollett as Jamal Lyon, and Bryshere Y. Gray as Hakeem Lyon.
The season finale brought in some musical heavyweights. The week before, we'd seen the magnificent Mary J. Blige, who just gets better all the time. In the finale, Patti LaBelle, Rita Ora and Snoop Dogg made musical appearances.
But it was all about the drama. And oh, was there drama. Too many spoilers if you haven't been watching (and why haven't you been watching, again?), so we will just say: Empire strikes back. There are so many twists, so many things you really do not see coming that it's hard to believe where we end up.
Glee may have taken its final bow on Fox, but Empire, which was renewed for a second season, is definitely here to stay. And Lee Daniels has become another gay showrunner contender, joining Ryan Murphy, Kevin Williamson, Greg Berlanti, Bryan Fuller and Peter Nowalk. He's also a black showrunner, of which we have Shonda Rhimes and �" So bravo to Lee Daniels and to Empire. Our head's still spinning from the things that went down on that finale. So go, go now, get it on Netflix. Watch. Love. (And don't forget to count Cookie's furs. In the first hour of the season finale we counted six. Cookie's ensembles �" remember, she spent 17 years in nothing but prison garb �" are a thing. Oh, are they a thing.)
We also want to just toss in here that while the gay storyline in Empire is massively important, so is the mental health storyline. Denial and shame have been an issue with regard to mental illness in the black community and, as he has with homophobia, Daniels has taken the subject on �" hard �" with his portrayal of Andre's bipolar disorder and its impact on him and his family. As much as Lucious can't handle his son Jamal's homosexuality, Cookie has trouble with their son Dre's mental illness. But deconstructing and demystifying the disease �" and clarifying that it is indeed a disease �" has been a vital element of this storyline. It is also one more way Empire is breaking down stereotypes, because Dre is the antithesis of the media representation of the "crazy black dude." Through this storyline, Daniels explores just how dangerous that stereotype of the out-of-control black man has been to black men in America. Which, in the current climate of police brutality against men (and women) of color, is imperative.
Out lesbian director and screenwriter (Oscar-nominated The Kids Are All Right) Lisa Cholodenko exec produces and directs NBC's controversial drama The Slap. Not everyone likes this show. We happen to love it. On the March 19 episode, we were reminded of a key element we like about this show �" nuance.
It was almost a throwaway. Britten, a patient of Aisha's (Thandie Newton) �" 20something, white, gay �" is sick. As he described his symptoms and she cut through his BS to tell him he was doing meth, we had a grim flashback to another time and place. Reddish circles under his eyes. Pale skin. Sweats. Weight loss. Diagnosis: pneumonia. Or is it? It is, but it's so much more.
Aisha leaves the room, tells him to wait, tells her assistant �" who also delivers the news that the patient has tested positive for HIV �" to order an ambulance.
Meth, sex, AIDS. It's not a new story. The majority of new infections in the U.S. are in young men between the ages of 24 and 30. New York leads the nation in new HIV/AIDS cases, and 80% of those are in New York City, where The Slap takes place. Aisha runs a clinic for people who have money and health insurance problems.
But Aisha's patient takes off before she can get him in the ambulance. And it takes the full hour for her to get him back to the clinic, where he breaks down, sobbing, and she promises to go with him in the ambulance to the hospital.
It's not quite so cut-and-dried, however. Over the course of the episode �" including a period where Aisha attends an infectious disease conference in Boston �" Aisha is revealed as a deeper character than we've previously seen her to be. (Each episode focuses on one of the characters in this ensemble drama.)
Aisha has been presented to us as a good girl. The responsible black doctor wife of her husband, Hector (Peter Sarsgaard), the Last Decent Man in New York, as people call him. Hector is also the son of Greek immigrants, coming to the U.S. as a boy. Aisha has never felt like part of the family, despite the couple's two children.
Aisha is hard-working and a bit of a bitch. We've seen her as straight-laced and uptight and rigid. But as the episode evolves, we discover that she was a sex-addicted, drug-addicted medical resident who just barely escaped the fate that has now been visited on her patient. So she has a story for him that keeps him there in her clinic this time, waiting for the ambulance. And she reminds him that his life isn't over, that he can re-start his life from now. And we believe her. But can she take her own advice?
The Slap is a powerful show. It's got a lot of gay stuff embedded in it, and it also speaks directly to issues of enforced masculinity in America. Out gay actor Victor Garber does the narration.
Scandal subplot
One of the saddest things we've seen on the tube in recent weeks (the Glee finale doesn't count because it was glorious sad, not tragic sad) was another seeming throwaway subplot on Scandal. (BTW, Cyrus' forced marriage to his sex worker ex is on the horizon, and Olivia wants it to be at the White House �" gay wedding at the Republican White House! �" so set the DVR for the next two weeks.) This little subplot �" this gutting, emotional, historical subplot �" involved the black woman who lives down the hall from Olivia (Kerry Washington). She was murdered when Olivia was kidnaped, a casualty of Beltway politics and terrorism and, as it turns out, homophobia.
Over the course of a few episodes an elderly black woman has been looking for Olivia's neighbor, another elderly black woman. Looking while Olivia was in captivity and looking afterward. And when the totality of the story is revealed, it turns out Olivia's neighbor �" in her late 70s �" was a lesbian, and the woman searching for her is her longtime lover.
They had met as girls and had been lovers. But "times were different then," and Olivia's neighbor was forced by her family to marry a man. But then they connected again, years later, and had been together ever since. "I want more time with her." But as Olivia sits across from the woman searching for the love of her life, Olivia knows she's already dead. The guilt, the anger, the outrage �" it's hard to contain.
It's not a story that takes up a lot of screen time. But it's resonant. It's a reminder that outside of our bicoastal LGBT-centric worlds, there's a lot of misery in the places where it's still presumed people choose to be gay or lesbian (as Dr. Ben Carson keeps saying is the case). There has been a lot of misery for generations among lesbians and gay men. Just ask Aaron Schock, whose father told the media this week that he'd prefer that his son were a criminal to his being gay.
The sadness of all those women and men separated from their lesbian and gay lives by the hatred of others. And knowing it's still happening? Gutting.
There's a small bit in the Empire finale where Jamal is signing his new album, and these two young white guys are in line, and the one thanks him for coming out and says it changed his life. He's there with his brother. And you see, just in that two-minute bit, thrown away in the middle of a totally huge episode, that this is still a thing for us. Validation of our reality. Models. Being shown that it's not just us, that it won't always be terrible �" whether it's the years of being bullied at McKinley High with Slushies thrown in your face, or it's the quiet satisfaction of finally getting to be with the woman you've loved all your life, even though your youth together was stolen from you �" these moments resonate. We need them on TV and elsewhere. But on TV, kids all over America get to see a glimmer, a glimpse, a peak at the lives they could have. The best out and open, loud and proud lives.
We can't deny the importance of these representations of our lives on the tube. They matter. We can't even know for sure how much they matter, just that they do. A lot.
It's been 18 years since Ellen DeGeneres came out as a lesbian on her sitcom. Fast-forward and she's become one of America's beloved comedians, winning a plethora of Emmys and introducing daytime to a daily dose of dykiness. We don't watch much daytime TV, but we happened to see Ellen last week, which was "Madonna Week," with the singer performing every day. We've been kinda cranky about Madonna over the past year or so, with her racialized remarks on Twitter and her bad politics. But we have to say, Madge still brings it to the stage.
And so does Ellen. We used to be an Oprah disciple, so we watched Oprah regularly. We've never been an Ellen devotee, although we like her a lot. But we'd forgotten that her show is as much a "here's how you do good in the world" program as Oprah's, just different. Then she brought a Latina teacher up from the audience and gave her $20,000 because every day at the elementary school in Arizona where she teaches she feeds and clothes and brushes the teeth of her students because they come from poverty and most often haven't eaten since the night before and often aren't clean, and she pays for everything out of her own pocket. It was a testament to how much individual goodness there is out there, and how much more is needed. But it made us love Ellen just that much more.
Ellen has another show on the tube now, too. ABC debuted One Big Happy on March 17. Ellen is the producer of the sitcom, created by lesbian comedian and actress Liz Feldman (2 Broke Girls, This Just Out). Feldman has also been a writer for Ellen's daytime show. It's hard not to like One Big Happy. Elisha Cuthbert stars as Lizzy. (Yes, Lizzy the lesbian. But just as we let Leslie the lesbian go on Chicago Fire, we will let Lizzy the lesbian go �" maybe �" here.) Cuthbert previously starred on ABC's cult fan-fave sitcom Happy Endings, which was cancelled after three seasons at the end of 2013.
On One Big Happy, Lizzy is 30 and lives with her best friend, Luke (Nick Zano), also 30. They are both single and have decided to have a baby together because �" they are both single and 30.
Enter Prudence (Kelly Brook), an English doctor in the U.S. on an expired visa. Luke and Prudence have a love-at-first-sight affair, and after a whirlwind few days, get married, leaving Lizzy pregnant with Luke's baby and unsure about her own future. If it seems heavy rather than funny, it's surprisingly not. It's not completely frothy, either, but a balance between millennial angst and good old-fashioned sitcom manipulation makes the laughs good and the convoluted 21st century plot less tortured than it seems.
There are some great bits in the comedy, and Cuthbert is very funny. Is it as good as some other new sitcoms like Fresh Off the Boat, Black-ish and Undateable (which has a gay male character)? Not yet, but it has potential. And the dynamics among the three main characters are excellent. Brook is a real standout here in her first foray into American TV (she's a star in the UK).
Speaking of standouts, we're not sure we could love The CW's iZombie, the new dramedy series based on yet another of the DC Comics, more. (The CW really has the market cornered on comics-to-TV shows.) We are loath to invoke the hallowed name of Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, but there is something about iZombie that gives us a little Buffy frisson. Time will tell. What we can says for sure is that iZombie, which premiered March 17 and in which New Zealand actress Rose McIver (Masters of Sex, Once Upon a Time ) stars as Olivia "Liv"Moore, a, well, zombie, is just fabulous.
Liv is a former Seattle medical resident hoping to be a surgeon. (Take that, Meredith Grey.) The workaholic resident goes to a party with another resident, but the party is attacked by zombies. She comes back to life in a body bag, and takes up a new job as a coroner's assistant so she can have access to, of course, brains. These she eats with ramen and hot sauce. If she doesn't feed regularly, she gets more zombie-like: rage-filled, "stupid" and ready to blow up what's left of her life. There's a side effect of all these temporal lobe lunches, however: She "sees" scenes from the lives of those whose brains she consumes.
Enter the police. Clive Babinaux (Malcolm Goodwin) is a rooky homicide detective transferred from vice who is struggling to solve a case. Any case. (He also seems to be the only black detective on the squad.) Liv gets involved in the case of a Jane Doe whose brains she's eaten. Stuff happens.
Meanwhile, Liv's boss, Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), knows she's a zombie and wants to know all �" and thinks he can cure her. This little existential gem is ironic and deft and well worth watching.
Finally, if you still don't think TV matters, witness HBO's The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst, which turned out to be both aptly named and a real tour de force for the network. The documentary miniseries based on the life of millionaire real estate heir and accused killer Robert Durst ended in his arrest for murder.
So for comic-book heroes and real-life villains, and most of all, for images of us as we really are on the small screen, you know you really must stay tuned.