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Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.
IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: November 16, 2010
PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Glee, “The Substitute” (season 2, episode 7). [Stream on Netflix.]
WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: How do you feel about Gwyneth Paltrow? Oh, I can practically hear the whistle of steam coming from your collar. Gwyneth has become an undeniably polarizing figure; she’s a frequently great actress (Shakespeare in Love! The Royal Tenenbaums!) who can often deliver a clunker. Her People-magazine-friendly private life has been fascinating and oppressive at once. And via her personal branding venture “Goop,” she’s managed to become America’s white-lady-who-doesn’t-understand-why-you-don’t-do-yoga, but she’s so weirdly aware of herself, there’s a way to appreciate her as a kind of post-modern commentary on celebrity branding. So bad she’s good. If you squint hard enough.
Anyway, Gwyneth as a celebrity icon has been a fascination of Ryan Murphy’s going back to his days running the bonkers teen soap Popular on The WB. There, his popular-girl characters were obsessed with Gwyneth to a degree that approached mania. Which is why it must’ve been so gratifying for him to pull Paltrow into his stable during Glee‘s second season. Playing substitute-teacher Holly Holiday, Paltrow once agin leaned into her reputation. Either she’s fully aware of how incredibly square she looks when performing a fully censored rendition of “Forget You” and knows that’s why it’s funny, or else she is monstrously unaware of her own limitations and agreed to do it anyway. Either one features a degree of heart-stopping chutzpah.
While “Forget You” is obviously the performance that gets the most attention, equally garish are:
- …her duet with Rachel (Lea Michele) on “Nowadays/Hot Honey Rag” from Chicago, a number that both actress rip off wholesale from the film and stage versions, so much so that I’m surprised Gwen Verdon didn’t return from the dead like a Korean vengeance ghost in order to get payback on these two.
- …the mashup of Rihanna’s “Umbrella” with “Singin’ in the Rain” with Mr. Shuster (Matthew Morrison), a production that is so incredibly satisfied with its own brilliant idea that they convinced Kevin McHale that he could pull off a Jay-Z voice.
It’s like the spirit of Paltrow’s rich-white-girl (over-)confidence infused the entire cast and crew, much like Goop’s daily moisturizer infuses linseed extract and vitamins C and E. For all this and for creating one of the most memorable Glee episodes of all time, we tip our umbrella-ella-ella to you, Gwyneth.
