Glee says goodbye to Cory Monteith with earnest but awkward tribute

http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/oct/11/glee-cory-monteith-tribute-fox

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Glee's tribute show to Cory Monteith, entitled The Quarterback, began with a deep breath. Five new cast members standing on a dark stage, dressed in black, lit by spots, singing the familiar opening lines from Rent – "Five hundred, twenty-five thousand, six hundred minutes" – while the original cast members, looking almost middle-aged (Puck? Was that you?), filed in front of the camera. A reminder that the Seasons of Love haven't waited for anyone.

The song ended on a vast, red-blooded, Technicolor picture of the quarterback himself. No lurid or seedy references to junkies here. We might know that Cory Monteith died of a drug and alcohol overdose at the age of 31, but Glee couldn't possibly comment. For once, it abdicated its teaching moment. After all, the show must go on.

After the song, we cut to Kurt packing, expressing his thoughts in a voiceover, and looking at a graduation picture of Finn, back in the day when his life stretched ahead and anything was possible.

"Honestly, what can you say about a 19-year-old who dies?" he thought-spoke. "Everyone wants to know about how he died, but who cares? One moment in his own life. I care more about how he lived."

And with that, the death of Cory and the the death of Finn became two completely different things.

Tabloid Cory never appeared in front of the camera. Finn was the super jock who became a song-and-dance man, the teen who stood up for the underdog and volunteered to serve his country. (That's when he first disappeared from the show so Monteith could enter rehab, or so the rumor had it.) But there was no need for rehab for Fox's ultimate all-American. Drugs were never a part of his storyline, even if they were seldom apart from his life.

So the writers skipped over tawdry details with a mind-your-own-business sanctimoniousness, which fits in well with the moral Mount Olympus Glee now sits on. The theme of this week's show was grief. And no-one does grief better than a glee club with their cover versions of The Pretenders, James Taylor and Springsteen.

But the show wasn't completely unmoving. There were unexpected moments of poignancy, like Finn's mother packing up his belongings through tears, saying: "I always thought … how do parents go on when they lose a child. You know, when I would see that stuff on the news, I would turn it off, because it was just too horrible to think. But I would always think: how do they wake up every day? I mean, how do they breathe? But you <em>do</em> it, though, and for just a second you forget. And then: oh. You remember. You know it's like getting that call again and again every time. You don't get to stop waking up. You have to keep on being a parent even though you don't have a child any more."

The dramatic tension came with wondering where Lea Michele (Rachel) and Dianna Agron (Quinn) were. Gossip before the show had it that Agron was not invited to participate in the tribute episode because of her unpopularity. Agron was one of the mega-watt stars who gave Glee its early energy that it's never quite recaptured. Whatever the reason for her absence from the tribute, she was a big loss.

Michele, on the other hand, who dated Monteith, came on in tears at around the 33rd-minute mark to sing what had been the original Finn/Rachel duet: Make You Feel My Love, Adele's Bob Dylan hit.

Jane Lynch, appearing as Sue Sylvester, seemed to be channeling the show's producers, since she didn't know whether to be sad or impatient at the death of such a huge character. 

"Principal Sylvester told us the candles have to go," was the great line from one of the Cheerios as she began to take down the memorial.

And the best line of the night was not said but written, attributed to Finn Hudson, but just as easily Cory Monteith's. It was engraved under a headshot of Monteith as Hudson.

"The show must go … all over the place … or something."

And that's exactly what this tribute show did.

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