After being bombarded for weeks on end by promo after promo after promo, tonight was finally the night: the  ’special preview episode’ of the new Fox series Glee (the show premieres next week.)

Thanks to these promos, in the lead up to tonight I  had crafted an admittedly delusional mental image of what this show might be – Arrested Development in a high school Glee club. My hopes were high.

The first couple of acts proved to be an adjustment period, to say the least. I was distracted at first by the similarities to Election – the blended-source narration, the desperate-to-achieve outcast schoolgirl, the singing jock tapping into his sensitive side – and I also struggled a bit to discern who’s story this was. But as the show played on I got more comfortable in the world and found myself completely caught up by the end.

The writing at times seemed a little ’surface’, and some of the dialogue too ‘on the nose’, but the great cast of new faces and old favorites and the incredible music (most notably the cast’s rendition of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing that closed the episode) more than made up for it.

So is Glee the new classic it’s been billed as? It’s still too soon to tell.

Will I be watching to find out? Most definitely.

Tags: 40, Broken Forty, Fox, Glee, News, Review, Series, Television

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2009 at 11:28 pm and is filed under Industry News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.