'Glee', 'Greek' And How Diversity Plays Into An Ensemble Cast
I’d like to start this off by saying I still love “Glee.” For so many reasons. It’s original, sharply written, well acted (for the most part) and the first musical production I’ve seen since “Guys and Dolls” three years ago that didn’t make me want to cut my ears off. So that’s saying a lot. Plus, as we covered in our Friday Forum feature a few weeks back, there was the whole brilliant story arc around Kurt. Still, there’s been one persistent issue that I’ve increasingly struggled with over the past couple of months: The underused and underdeveloped minority characters in the ensemble cast.
I wanted to write a post on this in light of Variety reporting that The Multicultural Motion Picture Association would be honoring “Glee” with the favorite new television cast ensemble award at the 17th annual Diversity Awards. On the one hand, the cast is a diverse bunch to a degree that you don’t often see on a mainstream teen television show on cable. At the same time, that’s one of the reasons why it is so disappointing that these parts have not been given the respect or dimensions of Rachel, Quinn, Finn or Kurt. Apart from fairly thin adjunct story lines to the main characters’ (even in the episode New York Magazine acutely titled “Minority Report” in its recap), some stinging one liners (like Mercedes’ killer delivery of “My dad’s a dentist” after someone makes a reference to her class) and a handful of solos and dance numbers, there is hardly any depth to the roles of Mercedes, the outspoken soul singer who draws “Aretha” comparisons, or Tina, a shy, stuttering Asian girl who dresses in goth (as of now, the same could also be said of the wheelchair-bound Artie). We have yet to even enter any of their homes.
For some this has been a criticism of the show from the beginning. Over on the blog Racialicious, concerns were raised over the stock types of Mercedes and Tina, in particular, when the show first premiered during the summer, even bringing in an always-heated comparison to the painfully stereotypical Long Duk Dong from “Sixteen Candles.” Others, however, have more recently defended the show with the belief that although the critique is legit as of now, “Glee” just needs more time to deepen the backgrounds of its remaining players in the same way it has with the main crew. I land somewhere in between these two camps. While I don’t see the show as committing any egregious missteps so far and have enjoyed the edgy satirical commentary on high school stereotypes served up by Jane Lynch as Cheerios’ taskmaster Sue Sylvester, the defense that there hasn’t been enough episodes to pay more attention to those supporting roles seems weak to me.
It became even harder to shake that feeling this past weekend when I re-watched the first season of ABC Family’s show “Greek,” a show with an equally diverse ensemble that seems to have consistently done a much better, more seamless job of splitting the focus between all members of the cast and gradually fleshing out the supporting roles into full-fledged believable teens and young adults. Granted, the race and ethnicity aspect of characters is played very differently in each show with “Greek” putting it largely in the background in favor of defining identity by other means (school, family, the Greek system), but the structures are similar enough to beg the question of “why not?” with the time argument. Not that the show has a responsibility to make the most of its potential to do more with the talented assortment of actors and actresses, but after seeing how skillfully it was handled in the case of Kurt and watching the show repeatedly use race and ethnicity as material, I can’t help but hope to see the show live up to the honor of the “Diversity Awards.” For now, I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt and hoping the remainder of the season will do just that.
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