Favorites of 2010: Movies and television

The end of the year tends to put one—or at least me—in a reflective and retrospective mood. What follows is a list of my favorite movies and television from 2010; books, music, and art will be included in my next post.

Please note that these are not movies or TV shows that were necessarily created or released in 2010, but rather ones that I first encountered in 2010. As you'll see, almost all of these favorites date from years or decades earlier.

Bollywood 2010

Is it just me, or was this a pretty dismal year for Bollywood? I found myself following the examples of Memsaab, Beth, and Bollyviewer in turning primarily to Bollywood's Silver and Golden Ages for my viewing pleasure.

Favorite Bollywood movie: (tie)

Seeta aur Geeta (1972)

What a delightful movie! Hema Malini is adorable in a double role as twin sisters separated at birth. Seeta is raised to be a properly submissive daughter in a rich household, but her greedy relatives cruelly exploit her. The spirited Geeta is raised by a poor family and becomes a street performer with her partner Raka (Dharmendra). Of course the twins get switched, their respective families get big surprises, and many catchy R.D. Burman songs (and a few tight slaps) ensue before everything is sorted out. If for some reason you haven't yet seen this charmer (directed by Ramesh Sippy and written by Javed Akhtar, Satish Bhatnagar and Salim Khan) put it at the top of your list.

Sadhna (1958)

Yes, this classic from Yash Chopra's older brother B. R. is a tawaif-with-a-heart-of-gold story. But the great performance of Vyjayanthimala as the courtesan Champabai, the wonderful songs of N. Dutta (music) and Sahir Ludhianvi (lyrics), and the film's powerful indictment of the exploitation and oppression of women, make this a very special experience. As always, I'm lagging behind in my discovery: see Memsaab's post on Sadhna from two years ago, which is beautifully written and filled with screencaps of M.N. Malhotra's gorgeous black and white cinematography.

Favorite Bollywood soundtrack: Barsaat Ki Raat (1960)

This movie is full of wonderful music sung by the great Mohammad Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar and Asha Bhosle. But what makes this one of the greatest soundtracks ever are a series of qawwali competitions where the performances just keep getting more brilliant with every exchange. Rohan (music) and our friend from Sadhna, Sahir Ludhianvi (lyrics), outdid themselves; this film has almost too much great music to take in. And if that's not enough, you get to see the songs picturized on Bharat Bushan, Madhubala, and the sparkling Shyama and Ratna.

Favorite non-Bollywood movie: Tokyo Story (1953)

An elderly couple (Chishu Riyu and Chieko Higashiyama) make a once-in-a-lifetime trip to the big city to see their children and grandchildren—only to discover that no one has any time for them. A radiant Setsuko Hara, the couple's daughter-in-law, is the only one who treats them with kindness; but we can see that her own life is cruelly constrained by her poverty and widowhood. Director/writer Yasujiro Ozu takes this simple story and creates a masterpiece of restraint in which details of the characters' lives and emotions are slowly unveiled. As rich an experience as reading a great novel.

Favorite English-language movie: Flushed Away (2006)

We're big fans of Nick Park's Wallace & Gromit series, but somehow we missed this Aardman Animations feature when it came out. Maybe the comical adventures of rats in the London sewers didn't sound all that appealing at the time. Flushed Away turned out to be hilarious, with sight gags and movie references coming so fast that it's difficult to catch them all. And the characters are voiced by actors Hugh Jackman, Kate Winslet, Ian McKellan and Bill Nighy.

Favorite TV show (on DVD, of course): Middlemarch (1994)

George Eliot's Middlemarch is an 800-page novel, but this excellent BBC/Masterpiece Theater series—written by Andrew Davies of Pride and Prejudice fame—manages to include virtually every major incident in the book (and many of the character-revealing minor ones). A wonderful cast, and of course fabulous costumes and locations, make this another great BBC adaptation.

Runner-up: Glee, Season 1

I wrote about Glee recently; since that post we've continued watching the first season. The story lines are getting ever more absurd, the quality of the music is wildly uneven, and it feels like the last third of the season is just marking time until the big finale. It still manages to be utterly addictive, though.

Next time: Books, music, and art

Handel's Serse

When I heard that Alan Curtis would be conducting and Paula Rasmussen would be starring in the Berkeley West Edge Opera's production of Handel's Serse (Xerxes, 1738), I was astounded. Curtis is one of the world's foremost conductors of Baroque music, and together with his period instrument orchestra Il Complesso Barocco has made more than a dozen full-length recordings of rarely-performed Handel operas such as Deidamia (1741), Tolomeo (1728), and Floridante (1721). If you're looking for a great place to acquaint yourself with both Curtis and Handel opera, I highly recommend Amor e gelosia: Handel Operatic Duets featuring the beautifully intertwined voices of Patrizia Ciofi and Joyce DiDonato.

Paula Rasmussen is Serse in the only available DVD of the Italian-language version of the opera; her conductor is Christophe Rousset with Les Talens Lyriques, and her co-stars include Sandrine Piau, Isabel Bayrakdarian, Patricia Bardon and Ann Hallenberg. Here's a clip of Rasmussen from this Dresden Semperoper production, performing Serse's exquisite opening aria "Ombra mai fu":

https://youtu.be/WH7GSJoDUDM?t=430

And yes, Serse is singing to a tree, which immediately suggests that Handel intended for the opera to have a less-than-fully-serious tone. Thanks to that unusual mixture of comic and serious elements Serse came in for some criticism in Handel's time. The printed libretto contained a note To the Reader which alerted its first audiences that the story contained "some imbicillities" [sic], though those imbecilities were largely derived from Herodotus' account of Xerxes in his Histories. And Charles Burney, in his A General History of Music (1789) wrote that the libretto "is one of the worst that Handel ever set to Music: for besides feeble writing, there is a mixture of tragic-comedy and buffoonery in it..." In Handel's time, serious and comic elements in opera tended to be strictly separated: an opera was either seria or buffa. Handel, however, mixed the serious and the comic in operas such as Agrippina (1709), Partenope (1730) and Serse, looking back to the 17th-century models of Monteverdi and Cavalli, and anticipating the Da Ponte and Mozart operas of the 1780s.

With a conductor and lead singer of international stature, this fall's BWEO production of Serse (seen November 21) promised to be a landmark. But as I was settling into my excellent seat—the 600-seat Performing Arts Theater at El Cerrito High School is quite intimate, an ideal venue for Baroque opera—I noticed that this three-act opera was being presented in only two parts, and that nearly an hour of music had been cut.

Worse was the program note from BWEO artistic director Mark Streshinsky, which unfortunately I had the leisure to read before the curtain rose. First he mentions his conception of Xerxes: "He has an absolutely brilliant military intellect, he is prone to outbursts, he's evidently obsessed with botany, and he has no clue as to the personal feelings or emotions of the people around him. I suddenly thought to myself: 'This guy has Aspergers's [sic] Syndrome!'" Of course this diagnosis is not only anachronistic, it's unnecessary—after all, isn't Xerxes the absolute ruler of the Persian Empire, and wouldn't that explain sufficiently his disregard for other people's feelings? But then Streshinsky continues, "Un-doctored, Handel operas are a great challenge to a director and to an audience....Cuts and, in this case, a re-configuration of Act 3 do wonders for the plot, avoiding several moments that make me think 'Huh?'"

While the conventions of early 18th-century opera may be unfamiliar to modern audiences, a heavy directorial hand can make things less rather than more comprehensible. Cutting and re-arranging Handel's work not only does violence to its musical and dramatic integrity, but the disjointed result can drag, rather than flow. As Handel scholar Winton Dean has written, "The organization is so taut, and the equilibrium between the musical, dramatic and scenic components so nicely balanced, that almost any cut weakens the design. As a result, the duration appears longer, not shorter, when cuts are made..."* And any director whose response to an opera is "Huh?" should probably think about staging a different opera. So it was with a sinking heart that I awaited the opening chords of the overture.

It quickly became clear that Streshinsky's production was going to be bright, bold (Lucas Krech's lighting design washed the stage backdrop with intense pinks, oranges and blues), modern, and broadly campy. Here's a taste of the approach: Serse's aria "Io dirò che l'amo né mi sgomentarò" (I will say that I love her); the observers are Xerxes' brother Arsamene (countertenor Ryan Belongie) and the servant Elviro (bass Don Sherrill):

(Set by Liliana Duque Piñeiro; costumes by Romy Douglass.)

Camp is the default approach to Baroque opera by directors who don't trust the musical and dramatic material to hold the audience's interest. The danger with such an approach is that as the director strives for cheap laughs he can obscure or undercut the moments of genuine feeling. But this kind of comic approach can also work—as David McVicar's Bollywood Giulio Cesare (Julius Caesar, 1724) has shown—and it did so here, pretty delightfully.

Xerxes falls in love with Romilda, the brightly soubrettish and very game Angela Cadelago. Romilda, though, already has a secret lover: Arsamene. Here is Cadelago singing Romilda's aria "Nemmen con l'ombre d'infedeltà" (No shadow of unfaithfulness):

The burly Elviro garbs himself in highly unconvincing drag in order to convey a clandestine love-note from Arsamene to Romilda; but the message gets intercepted by Romilda's gawky, lovelorn kid sister Atalanta (the wonderful Anna Slate), who uses it to try to snag Arsamene for herself:

Meanwhile, Xerxes' dumped fiancée Amastre (rich-voiced contralto Sonia Gariaeff) shows up in male drag (all the cross-dressing is in the original, by the way) to keep an eye on Xerxes. Many love complications ensue before all the proper couples are sorted out in the end.

Musically, the evening was a bit mixed. The singers were generally excellent, especially the four principal women (Rasmussen, Cadelago, Gariaeff and the wide-eyed Slate, who practically stole the show when she emerged from under the heaving bed on which Romilda was trysting with Arsamene). Under Curtis' direction the instrumentalists (some of whom were moonlighting from well-known Bay Area Baroque ensembles) gave a strong account of Handel's great score. Highlights included Rasmussen's glorious "Ombra mai fu," her duet with Gariaeff, "Gran pena e gelosia," and Gariaeff's mournful solo aria "Cagion son io del mio dolore". Mention should also be made of Gilbert Martinez's fluent and amusing harpsichord continuo playing: at one point an all-too-familiar arpeggio indicated the ringing of a character's cell phone.

But the cuts to Handel's music were quite extensive. Some arias were cut entirely, and others lost their B sections and/or da capo repeats. Cutting the repeats of da capo arias not only makes them shorter, but less meaningful. In a da capo aria the first section expresses an emotion, and then the second section a contrasting emotion. When the music of the first section is repeated, we return as well to the first emotion, only this time it's inflected with the second emotion. Cut the second part and the repeat of the first part, and those nuances disappear (and the characters' emotional responses get flatter and less complex). However, given that Streshinky's production was aiming more at comedy than pathos, the cuts weren't as damaging as they might have been in an opera like Alcina or Ariodante.

The success of this production suggests that the Berkeley West Edge Opera might want to look at some other ironic or comic Baroque operas, such as Monteverdi's L'incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea, 1642), Cavalli's La Calisto (1651), or Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728). I think they'd have a chance of being as crowd-pleasing as this winning, clever and highly enjoyable production of Serse.

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* Winton Dean, "Production style in Handel operas," in The Cambridge Companion to Handel, Donald Burrows, ed., Cambridge University Press, 1997, p. 253.

Baroque Bollywood Part 2

A continuation of Baroque Bollywood Part 1, tracing the parallels between Baroque opera and Bollywood:

Love triangles: Love triangles in Baroque opera can get quite, er, baroque. In Vivaldi's Ottone in Villa (1713), for example, the Roman emperor Ottone loves Cleonilla, who has a crush on her male page "Ostilio," who is really a disguised woman named Tullia, who has come to court seeking her former lover Caio, who abandoned her and now loves Cleonilla. Got all that?

A similarly tangled love plot features in Handel's opera Serse (Xerxes, 1738): Atalanta is in love with Arsamene, who loves Atalanta's sister Romilda, who loves Arsamene in return, but finds herself also subject to the amorous attentions of Serse.

This double triangle—two sisters in love with the same man, two men in love with the same sister—is uncannily similar to the plot of the Bollywood movie Dil Hai Tumhaara (My Heart Is Yours, 2002). In that film, Mahima Chaudary loves Arjun Rampal, who loves Mahima's half-sister Preity Zinta, who loves Arjun in return; meanwhile, Preity's childhood friend Jimmy Shergill has secretly been in love with her for years. The complication in DHT is that Preity so desperately wants her sister to be happy that she asks Arjun to marry Mahima, and for Jimmy to pretend to love herself. To do so, of course, he has to pretend that he doesn't already love her. This sort of delirious perversity is what makes DHT one of my favorite love-triangle movies, but I'm hesitant to recommend it to anyone who values their sanity.

Among my other favorite love-triangle Bollywood movies are Baarsaat Ki Raat (One Rainy Night, 1960), where both Madhubala and Shyama love Bharat Bhusan; Katha (1983), where quiet, shy Naseeruddin Shah loves Deepti Naval, who is infatuated with the heartless cad Farooq Shaikh; Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Something Is Happening, 1998), where Kajol falls in love with her college classmate Shah Rukh Khan just as he's falling in love with new girl at school Rani Mukherjee, then years later Shah Rukh discovers that he loves Kajol after all—but only after she's become engaged to Salman Khan; and Kal Ho Naa Ho (Tomorrow May Never Come, 2003), where Shah Rukh Khan teaches Saif Ali Khan how to woo Preity Zinta, the woman Shah Rukh himself has fallen in love with. (A man acting as a go-between for the woman he loves and another man is also a subplot Handel uses in Serse.)

Some other plots that are common in both Baroque opera and Bollywood:

Revenge: A son who must revenge his father's or mother's humiliation or death is central to Baiju Bawra (1952), Amar Akbar Anthony (1978), Rocky (1981), Khal Nayak (The Anti-Hero, 1993), Karan Arjun (1995), Trimurti (Trinity, 1995), Koyla (Coal, 1997), and countless other films. It's also a subplot in Handel's Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Julius Caesar in Egypt, 1724). Sesto, the son of the Roman general Pompey, must avenge the murder of his father and the imprisonment and attempted seduction of his mother at the hands of the treacherous Greek-Egyptian ruler Tolomeo (Ptolemy). Sometimes, as with Tolomeo, the evil done by the villain is so profound that justice can only be served by his death. This is also true of the bad guys in Koyla, Trimurti, Karan Arjun, Khal Nayak, and many other Bollywood films.

But in Baiju Bawra, when the moment of truth arrives for the son, he finds himself unable to carry out his revenge. And this is another common plot element in both Bollywood and Baroque opera:

Forgiveness: In Bollywood, tyrannical fathers and other authority figures who transgress against those under their power are often forgiven, no matter how outrageously they've overstepped the bounds of justice. In Ishq (Love, 1998), for example, the fathers of Ajay Devgn and Juhi Chawla will stop at nothing to get their children married to one another, even though Ajay loves Kajol and Juhi loves Amir Khan. The fathers force their children to unwittingly sign false marriage contracts, deceive them into thinking that Kajol and Amir are lovers, have both Kajol and Amir attacked by goons and Amir brutally tortured, and blackmail Kajol and Amir into leaving India entirely. But in the final five minutes, as Kajol and Amir are boarding a ship into exile, there is a tearful confrontation on the dock, the true lovers are reunited, and everyone forgives the two fathers.

Ishq may be way—way—over the top. But Baroque opera got there first. In Handel's Rodelinda (1724), the villain Grimoaldo invades and conquers the kingdom of his neighbor Bertarido, imprisons him and sentences him to death, attempts to seduce Bertarido's wife Rodelinda, threatens to kill her child if she doesn't marry him, and abandons his own former lover Eduige. However, Bertarido escapes, and in the last five minutes of the opera saves Grimoaldo's life, forgives him, reunites him with Eduige, and reinstates him as the ruler of the neighboring kingdom.

The emphasis on magnanimity, of course, is intended to legitimate a system in which the father/ruler wields all the power. We've just spent three hours watching that power being employed arbitrarily, selfishly, and unjustly, which might tend to make us question its very basis. But both Baroque opera and Bollywood want it both ways: they want to move us with the plight of characters who are experiencing unmerited suffering, and reassure us that the father/ruler will ultimately be reformed. Because the supreme value of both forms is the...

Happy ending. As Shah Rukh Khan's Om Prakash says so memorably in Om Shanti Om (2007), if the ending is not happy, then the movie is not over, my friend. There are a few exceptions: Devdas (1935, 1955, 2002, et seq.), Mughal-e-Azam (The Great Mughal, 1960), and Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (From One Heartbreak to Another, 1988) are tragedies, and the later films of Guru Dutt, such as Khagaaz Ke Phool (Paper Flowers, 1959) and Sahib Bibi aur Ghulam (Master, Mistress and Servant, 1962), also have dark endings. In Baroque opera, too, there are the rare works that end unhappily, such as Blow's Venus and Adonis (1684), Purcell's Dido and Aeneas (1689), or Handel's Tamerlano (1724).

However, in both Bollywood and Baroque opera the imperative that the ending be a happy one, and that a happy ending necessarily means the union or reunion of the main couple, can lead to some pretty wild plot contortions. Baroque operas went so far as to rewrite myths to make them conform to the need for a happy ending. The original Orpheus myth, for example, ends with Orpheus' wife Eurydice imprisoned forever in Hades and Orpheus being torn apart by the Maenads; but Monteverdi's L'Orfeo (1607) ends with Apollo reuniting the couple in the heavens.

So in both Bollywood and Baroque opera there can be a mad scramble in the last five minutes to tie up all the loose threads of the plot, forgive all transgressions, and unite the correct couples. For Bollywood, Ishq is a particularly egregious example, but last-minute reversals are legion. The "wrong" groom or bride realizes in the middle of the wedding ceremony that their bride or groom loves someone else, and steps aside so that the true lovers can be married (hello, Hum Aapke Hain Koun...! (What Am I To You?, 1994), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, Mujhse Dosti Karoge! (Will You Be My Friend?, 2002), Dil Hai Tumhaara, and Main Prem Ki Diwani Hoon (I'm Crazy About Prem, 2003)). Or the woman who has spent the entire film trying to unite with a distant, absent, or estranged lover realizes that she's fallen in love instead with the steadfast nice guy who's been helping her out the whole time (stand up, Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (My Heart Belongs To You, 1998), Kya Kehna (What Is There To Say, 2000), and Jab We Met (When We Met, 2007)). But a special prize has to be awarded to Lajja (2001), in which the happy ending is the loving reunion of a husband with his wife...the wife he has spent the previous three hours trying to kidnap and murder (!).

But again, Bollywood was simply following the well-worn path of Baroque opera. In Alessandro Scarlatti's Griselda (1721), Gualtiero tests his wife Griselda's fidelity by pretending to have killed their daughter, renouncing Griselda, forcing her to work as a slave in his household, promising her in marriage to one of his courtiers, and finally pretending that he is going to marry the young ward of a neighboring prince (really, his and Griselda's daughter). In the last five minutes of the opera Gualtiero reveals his deceptions, and restores the faithful (and still loving) Griselda as his wife.

Sometimes, perhaps, forgiveness can go too far, and the happy ending can seem instead like your worst nightmare.

Baroque Bollywood Part 1

A while ago, Memsaab drew attention to the many parallels between opera and Bollywood in her posts Opera and Hindi Cinema and The Bartered Dulhania. Those parallels are especially striking in Baroque opera, and so I thought I would add some items to Memsaab's lists and amplify some others. Life intervened, but at long last I'm following up on that impulse. To start, there's the question of

Originality (or lack thereof)

In the Baroque era, musical originality was not the supreme value that it later became. Composers thought nothing of recycling librettos and storylines. The librettos of Pietro Metastasio, the greatest poet of opera seria, were set multiple times by every major composer of the era.

Composers not only re-used characters and stories, they also recycled their own and others' melodies. Partly this was because there wasn't really any such thing as a repertoire—an opera would be performed for a season, or perhaps two, and then usually never be performed again. Why not make use of music that would otherwise be forgotten?

Handel, for example, re-used much of the opera, oratorio, and cantata music he'd written in Italy when he composed his first opera for London, Rinaldo (1711). One of the most famous arias from Rinaldo, Almirena's "Lascia ch'io pianga" (Let me weep over my cruel fate) was taken virtually note-for-note from Pleasure's aria "Lascia la spina" (Leave the thorns, pluck the rose) from the oratorio Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (The Triumph of Time and Dillusionment), which Handel wrote in Rome in 1707.

Handel wasn't above borrowing other composer's music, either, although he often altered and improved it. His early opera for Venice, Agrippina (1709), for example, includes material from operas by Handel's German colleagues Reinhard Keiser and Johannes Mattheson.

How else, one might ask, could Baroque composers maintain the incredible productivity that was demanded of them? Often they'd have only weeks to compose a four-hour-long opera which might involve 30 or 40 arias. Handel wrote more than 40 operas, plus oratorios, cantatas, motets, masses...that's a lot of tunes.

The productivity question arises with Indian movies as well. While I've heard various figures for the number of films Bollywood turns out in a year, it seems to be somewhere between 150 and 300. And that's just mainstream Hindi cinema; there are also films in Bengali, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, and Telugu, among other languages. The Central Board of Film Certification reported in 2009 that there were over 1200 feature films produced in India. No wonder Indian filmmakers borrow plotlines and characters from wherever they can find them: myths, novels, and especially other movies.

I haven't tried to keep count, but I've noticed that a lot of the Bollywood films we've seen draw either indirect or direct inspiration from Hollywood movies. Pyar To Hona Hi Tha (Love Had To Happen, 1998) borrows from French Kiss (1995); Mohabbatein (Love Stories, 2000) from Dead Poets Society (1989); the first Munna Bhai movie, Hum Kisi Se Kum Nahin (We're As Good As Anyone Else, 2002) from Analyze This (1999); Chori Chori (Secretly, 2003) from Housesitter (1992); Koi Mil Gaya (I Found Someone, 2003) from E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982); Life In A... Metro (2007) from The Apartment (1960), and on and on.

The tracing of borrowings can also become quite involved. Sholay (Flames, 1975), for example, one of the most revered films in Bollywood history, takes its main plot from Sergio Leone's Once Upon A Time In The West (1968), which itself borrowed from The Magnificent Seven (1960), which reimagines Akira Kurosawa's Shichinin no Samurai (Seven Samurai, 1954) as a Western. Heyy Babyy (2007) takes its premise from Three Men and a Baby (1987), which was itself a remake of the French film Trois hommes et un couffin (1985). Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (Silently, Secretly, 2001) borrows heavily from Pretty Woman (1990), which was a retelling of My Fair Lady (1964), which was a film version of the 1956 Lerner and Loewe Broadway show of the same title, which was a musical version of George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion (1912).

I can't say that all of these borrowings, influences and inspirations bother me in the slightest, apart from the question of writers receiving proper credit. For me it's mainly a question of how effectively the borrowings are Bollywoodized. Some Bollywood films are disappointingly literal: Life in a...Metro just transplanted The Apartment wholesale from New York to Mumbai. Others, though, improve on the originals. I'd rather watch Kajol than Meg Ryan, or Rani Mukherjee than Goldie Hawn, any day.

More parallels to follow!

Cartoonish, sordid, bawdy--and irresistible: Glee

Trust me to come late to any party. I've been hearing about the Broadway-goes-to-high-school Fox series Glee for over a year. Up until recently my aversion to TV programs that aren't BBC adaptations of 19th-century novels won out over my curiosity. Now that the complete first season is available on DVD, though, I've bowed to the inevitable.

Glee follows the fortunes of a high school glee club in a small midwestern city, and the format allows many opportunities for the cast (many of whom look like they haven't seen the inside of a high school classroom for a decade or so) to perform song and dance numbers. Unlike in most Bollywood movies or operas, in Glee musical numbers are usually diegetic. That is, when a character is singing and dancing, they're doing it in the context of an audition, a rehearsal, or a show that's actually happening in the world of the other characters. But like all musicals, Glee still offers the singing-in-the-shower fantasy of effortless performance. We see the performers going over a few dance steps, working on a couple of bars of music, and then the next thing we know, some Top 40 song or show tune standard has been reinvented in four-part harmony and synchronized gestures.

One reason four-part harmony and synchronized gestures don't happen spontaneously in my real life, apart from my lack of talent, is because they actually require hours of planning and grindingly repetitive rehearsal. Glee pretends to acknowledge the hard work that goes into that illusion of effortlessness, but in fact the rehearsal scenes are pretty cursory. Instead of watching our heroes practice under the critical eye of their director Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), most of our time is spent learning the details of their lives. This being Fox, those details are often cartoonish or sordid. I'm going to betray my old-fogeydom here, but the script is amazingly bawdy for a show that's broadcast (at least for now) at the family-friendly time of 8 pm on Tuesdays. It's also amazingly funny, with the evil cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Emmy-winner Jane Lynch) getting many of the most cutting lines.

Glee also pretends to side with the misfits and outcasts against the popular kids, but in the first half-dozen episodes we spend far more time with the Glee Club queen Rachel (Lea Michele), the conflicted quarterback Finn (Cory Monteith), and the mean head cheerleader Quinn (Dianna Agron) than with Mercedes (the amazingly talented and criminally underused Amber Riley, who seems to be the only black person in the school), Tina (Jenna Ushkowitz, who similarly seems to be the only Asian person), Kurt (Chris Colfer, whose bullied gay teen is one of the few characters on the show who actually looks teenaged) or Artie (Kevin McHale, whose wheelchair-bound character could raise lots of interesting issues if he were allowed more than one line per episode). Having served their purpose—tokens and foils—they've been pushed into the background.

But there's no point in being curmudgeonly about Glee—it breaks down all resistance, not to mention rational thought. The creators of the show have an unerring instinct for the soundtrack of Midwestern young adulthood over the past three decades: Journey, REO Speedwagon, Queen, Bon Jovi. And the arrangements of these "classics," glee-club style, are both inherently funny and surprisingly effective. What does it say about me that I actually enjoy the Glee-ified rendition of "Don't Stop Believin'"? Nothing very good, probably:

Throw in cameos and special appearances by Broadway stalwarts like Kristen Chenoweth (an original cast member of Wicked), Idina Menzel (an original cast member of both Rent and Wicked), and Neil Patrick Harris (of the brilliant Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog), and it's a pretty irresistible cocktail. Yep—I'm addicted.