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On my journey of engaging with and trying new forms of media, I've found that the two most recent shows I'm watching share a strange similarity. I started Glee because I've heard good and bad things about it, and I was curious. The BBC's Sherlock was on Hulu, and I was big into fandom culture back in middle school. So besides being early 2010's shows, what do they have in common? Glee is about high school kids performing in a glee club, and Sherlock is about Sherlock Holmes solving mysteries in modern London. They're so tonally different. The similarity comes from looking at their genres. Glee is a musical, teen comedy, and comedy drama. Sherlock is a mystery, crime, and... comedy drama. While they both function well in the comedy department, I found that they lack in the drama department. Let me explain further while prefacing that this is just my opinion, and while I may come off a little critical, I love both of these shows.
Glee
Part of why I discovered that Glee fails as a drama is because of a conversation I had with the other bloggers of UIC Radio, so a quick shoutout to them. Anyway, I'm only two episodes into Glee, so I don't have a great basis yet. I'm already seeing early warning signs, though. The arguable main character of Glee is Will Schuester, the teacher running the glee club. Besides being unlikable and a little creepy, he does not have reasonable motivations for his actions. In the first episode, we find out Will wants to run the glee club to relive the glory days of winning nationals in high school. His conflict is that he shouldn't run glee because he has a wife, and they want to get pregnant. The show frames this as a hard decision. Are you telling me I should genuinely be invested in this grown man's choice of hanging out with high schoolers over starting a family? Moving on with life is essential. You can't spend forever wishing to return to how it used to be. That would honestly be a great message to give your audience. Yet, Will decides to relish in his delusions. The funniest part of the episode is when a fellow teacher shows him a video of him winning nationals, and he says, "That was the greatest moment of my life." Sir, you are married and just found out you're having a child.
All this was to say that any of this works because the show is a comedy. There is no dramatic tension. The show wouldn't continue if Will chose to quit glee and invest in his family. We can laugh about it and accept it because it's supposed to be funny and a bit outlandish. Everything about this show seems to be. It is hard to relate to the serious things happening when the characters are more like caricatures. From what I've heard about future seasons, serious topics aren't handled well, and it also sounds like there's tonal whiplash. It's hard to be a drama when your characters' situations are like Will's, and you can't keep a consistent tone. Again, I am only two episodes in, but Glee definitely is not clicking as a drama.
Sherlock
Now, explaining this one isn't as easy. I finished the first season of Sherlock, so I am only three episodes in (but at the same time, there are only thirteen episodes, so I'm a quarter of the way done already). Sherlock tries harder to be a drama. It is a mystery, after all. There needs to be tension and suspense, and the characters must face intriguing issues, but not much of that happens. Sure, the mysteries are confusing initially, but there isn't much for the viewer to figure out because Sherlock pieces it all together. It's also hard when clues conveniently show up out of the blue. One notorious offense is in the third episode when Sherlock finds out that a painting is fake yet cannot explain how or why. He just knows it. I don't think the police are going to take that. Most times, he follows a rabbit trail and happens to be correct. It's just hard to find dramatic tension in it all when every case is solved easily.
The worst offender in my opinion is at the end of the episode. It is when we are introduced to the main antagonist, Moriarty. First, his first appearance is earlier in the episode when he's disguised as a "guy from IT"; he refers to it as a tactical play. It definitely wasn't just the show needing an excuse not to have him show up out of nowhere. Second, Moriarty borders on the level of being a cartoon supervillain. While he is a wonderful actor, his jokes and line delivery aren't giving "oh yeah, I should be scared of this guy." He comes off as quirky and different and my modern meme-rooted brain can't comprehend it. Imagine the Joker but British. The worst part is I love Moriarty. He's iconic. This scene of the episode is iconic. But I just don't think that's what should be taken away from a climactic scene at the end of your season. I should be on the edge of my seat, wondering what will happen next during the suspenseful last scene, not laughing because it's silly. There could be dramatic tension if you were a teenager watching this. In middle school, I thought this was cool. Maybe I'm biased since I know about the memes from this show better than the show itself, but even then, I still think it fails as a drama.