Will Schuster is kind of an anomaly. He’s a late Gen Xer, probably in his early thirties. He’s trying to relive his high school glee days, and relate to millennial kids that he coaches, which sometimes means even acting like a millennial. He dances, looks, and talks like a boy bander, a type of celebrity singer popular when I was in middle school.. Justin Timberlake, anyone? (I just checked. Justin Timberlake was born in 1981, so he’s a Gen X’er too, who’s fanbase was from the generation after him).
I suddenly realized during our screening that Will represents those people that don’t fit into these perfect millennial cycles Strauss and Howe depict. Sometimes it seems like our whole course is based on the presumption that a millennial generation exists* but I don’t think Will Schuster fits into the Gen Xer status or the millennial status, since he’s a blend of both, and what’s more, he chooses to be this blend. He got agency, acting on his desire to relate to kids and get along with his peers. He doesn’t fit the mold, he makes his own.
On a separate note, Doty’s article criticizes the “easy liberalism” of Glee – that it pretends to be liberal, proposing all the easily accepted ideas of the millennial generation, like racial and sexual diversity, without really going beneath the surface. In the first episode, only Rachel and Fin get their childhood stories told. But Mercedes does bring up the point that she doesn’t want to be “Kelly Rowland,” so at least the show doesn’t always ignore its biases.
In season 2 episode 16, I didn’t notice a whole lot of the improvements in letting the marginal characters have more of a voice… but I do think things have changed. Kurt’s story is just as important as Rachel’s, but I hated the scene with the three judges where they discussed gays – it felt too forced, as if the real millennials out there watching Glee don’t understand how to be open to homosexuality unless the program feeds it to them. We’re young, not babies. When TV proposes an issue like sexuality, and then provides the answer, there’s no room for discussion. So I think even though Glee is paying more attention to the lessons in season 2, it did a better job creating dialogue by remaining a little ambiguous in season 1.
*in class we’ve discussed how these cyclical generations cannot be proven and aren’t even relevant sometimes to the real world. Nevertheless, certain trends do appear.
