Television Notes

The final two hours of Glee were . . . well, gleeful. We had sort of drifted away from our Gleekdom these last two years, but we just had to see how they were going to end it. And it was a tearful goodbye to maybe the best musical series ever. Or at least in the last thirty or forty years. In the old days of variety shows, we had the excellence of Dinah Shore, Dean Martin, Frank Sinatra, and Judy Garland. But those were variety shows, with music and comedy sketches, not a series with a storyline like Glee, and not with a cast of singers like we heard on Glee. The final two hours took us back to Season I where we first met Will Schuester and Sue Sylvester, Rachel, Kurt, Finn, Artie, and Mercedes. Then we moved forward with the New Directions glee club, and finally into the future when Rachel, now married and pregnant with Kurt and Blaine’s child, finally wins her Tony award. Will Schuester is named superintendent of the William McKinley High School for the Performing Arts. Even Sue, now the U. S. Vice President, made her peace with Will. It was a wonderful way to end this ground-breaking show that gave us such great music. It also showed us the unacceptability of bullying, the acceptability of gay students and gay rights, and the dangers of drug overdoses with the tragic death of Cory Monteith. It was a great six seasons, Glee folks.

Must mention the PBS re-showing of the tribute to Judy Garland. It brought us back to just how great a singer and performer Judy Garland was, back to the tragedy of her life with pills and drugs, her up and down weight problems, her tragic death at 47. But most of all, we got to see again how charismatic a singer she was.

Another mention of two of the best shows on network tv: Madam Secretary and The Good Wife. Granted, the plot crises on Madam Secretary aren’t very realistic, but who cares? Téa Leoni, as Secretary of State and fourth in line for the presidency, would make nearly as good a president as Martin Sheen did in West Wing.

And Julianna Margulies, as the very good wife Alicia Florrick, will make an excellent Ohio State’s Attorney; Archie Panjabi as Kalinda Sharma is still one of the most interesting characters on the tube but may very well be on her way out of the series; Christine Baranski as Diane Lockhart-McVeigh discovers that shooting a deer is sort of fun; Mike Colter as the drug king Lemond Bishop has decided to hang up his kingpinship for the sake of his son; David Hyde Pierce as Frank Prady showed us that not all who run for public office are selfish, nasty people; and Michael J. Fox as Louis Canning is still not a very nice person.

And, finally, my discovery of Justified on FX. How could I not have found this show six seasons ago? I mean, it’s based on a story by one of my favorite authors, Elmore Leonard; it’s filled with typical Elmore Leonard characters speaking typical Elmore Leonard dialogue; it stars Timothy Olyphant as a typical Elmore Leonard bad ass, who speaks quietly and shoots fast. Olyphant, as Deputy Marshal Raylan Givens, walks like an old Western lawman, wears a cowboy hat that everyone makes fun of (but not to his face), and is more than willing to have an old Western High Noon shootout with anyone who wants to take him on. The body count in the series goes up and up with an assortment of Kentucky bad guys killing each other as fast as they can pull the trigger on a pistol or shotgun or rifle. I’m watching it on Amazon Prime, three or four commercial-free episodes at a time. I figure it will take me at least a month to catch up to Season Six and if I keep a careful tally I can add up the number of bodies that bite the dust. It’ll be a bunch.