Recently, my roommates and I started watching “Glee” as a house. We have all seen it before, but watching it as a so-called adult after first experiencing it as a middle schooler (I was late to the trend) is truly enlightening and got me thinking about how such an enigma of a show came to be.

Comedy as a genre does not get taken seriously. This is not a hot take. Comedy is supposed to make you laugh, so to take it seriously would be antithetical to its whole purpose. But as a result of this reputation as unsophisticated, comedy often gets the short end of the stick in the realm of television and movies.

Comedies are rarely nominated for Academy Awards and seldom win Best Picture (although awards shows are obviously problematic for many other more important reasons, I am simply using them here as a measure for what counts as prestigious). Even sitcom giants like “Friends” and “How I Met Your Mother,” which were trailblazers in their own right, are often written off as overrated, unrealistic, and unfunny, even though they remain widely enjoyed decades later. The stars of these shows are often relegated to the B or C-list category of celebrities, even though their faces and the jokes written for them have become iconic and globally recognizable. Take, for example, Uber Eats’ latest Super Bowl commercial, which featured Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer. The truth is, comedy has long been a driving force of the rapid evolution of television entertainment. I would argue that the evolution of comedy will be essential to television’s future.

Let’s take two opposite ends of the comedy spectrum: “The Sopranos” and “Glee.” Both shows, I would argue, have influenced the evolution of television, and the evolution of comedy specifically. They both have garnered loyal fans, appeal to a variety of target audiences, and (at least one of them, probably) would be taught in your film class. Indeed, a quick Google search of “The Sopranos” even classifies it as a drama and not a comedy—much more civilized. But before you start throwing tomatoes at me for making such a blasphemous comparison, I would like to give a disclaimer that I am not a film major, nor do I claim to be a television expert, though I do, like many others, enjoy many kinds of TV shows, comedies included.

“The Sopranos” takes two tropes and spins them on their head, a key element of many iconic modes of media. We have the model of the nuclear family sitcom (think “Full House,” “The Brady Bunch,” “Leave It To Beaver,” “All in The Family,” “Growing Pains,” etc.), except the father of the family is the head of the Italian mafia. Then you have the mob boss, stereotypical gangster (think “Godfather,” “Goodfellas,” “Scarface,” etc.), except now what if the gangster had anxiety attacks and needed to go to therapy and also maybe had a soul?

For “Glee,” you have something that is hardly ever done and, when it is done, is extremely hard to do well: the musical comedy television show. While the target audience of “Glee” was obviously young, it featured raunchier themes than most of the successful musical comedies that preceded it (probably because they mostly aired on Disney and Nickelodeon). You can tell it’s pulling from these examples (“High School Musical,” “Hannah Montana,” “Freaks and Geeks,” etc.) and then trying to fill in the cheeky, scandalous, risqué parts that may have been missing.

In looking at these two shows side by side, part of what seems to have made them pioneers in their respective fields is the way they dealt with representation. Both shows went looking for actors who had not yet been discovered—what “Glee” creator Ryan Murphy called “lightning in a bottle” casting in the recent documentary “The Price of Glee” (2023). James Gandolfini (Tony Soprano) was catapulted into stardom as a result of his starring role in “The Sopranos,” and the same went for most of the “Glee” cast, the exception being Lea Michele (Rachel Berry), who had previously been successful in musical theater. (Note: I will intentionally be ignoring the presence of Matthew Morrison on the show.)

The other side of representation is the actual groups and populations these two shows aimed to represent. In the case of “The Sopranos,” the main protagonists are Italian American, and the production team cast Gandolfini partly because they believed he could play the role in a way they saw as authentic. Gandolfini is an Italian American who grew up in New Jersey, as were many of the other cast members and their corresponding characters. The show was praised for presenting accurate storylines for Italian Americans in a way previous media representations had not. But other viewers criticized the show for doing just the opposite: caricaturing Italian Americans and perpetuating stereotypes concerning associations with the mafia, food, and promiscuity. 

As for “Glee,” in a departure from Disney Channel and Nickelodeon at the time, (though both have tried to up their diversity in recent years) the show centered around a diverse group of high school kids who didn’t fit in, but who found community in glee club. The show was revolutionary (again, at the time!) in its portrayal of LGBTQ+ relationships, and it attempted to spotlight the differences of all its characters in a positive light, even as Lea Michele continued to swing that spotlight back onto herself. Watching these newly-discovered actors make it big on television while also playing the parts of teenage students finding themselves and their identities was supposedly encouraging to young audiences. However, upon a second watch, so many of the jokes and storylines are so politically incorrect and offensive that their having a “diverse” cast does not make up for it. Is that maybe why they got away with so much? Who knows.

It is difficult to mention these shows without mentioning the real-life events that surrounded them and potentially helped cement their place in television history. Both James Gandolphini and three of the main “Glee” cast members—Cory Monteith, Naya Rivera, and Mark Salling—died sudden, premature deaths. Because they were symbols of popular media, in some ways it seems that these tragedies have been sensationalized to the point of promotion—that these mysterious real-life narratives make watching and rewatching these shows more appealing. We know that when artists die (young, especially), the prices of their work skyrocket. But I choose to believe the impact of these two shows extends far beyond what happened off-screen. 

“The Sopranos,” besides being technically advanced, reinvigorated national interest in serialized TV (a continuous narrative, as opposed to a season of disconnected episodes like a classic sitcom). It was innovative in its portrayal of women, teens, and family relationships, as well as in its centering of complicated, not purely “good” protagonists. The show is also visually appealing, with beautiful cinematography and of course, a controversial ending (that’s all I’ll say), which people still haven’t gotten over almost 20 years later.

I have already discussed most of what made “Glee” so novel. Being a musical comedy, it needed extremely high production quality and talent to match. The high school setting was important to garnering a hopelessly devoted fanbase and extending the show’s reach to live tours and marketable albums. Additionally, the pure outrageous ridiculousness of each episode’s storyline and characters went beyond being just comedic and turned into something so insanely shocking that it’s often hard to look away—sometimes out of interest, sometimes out of disgust, sometimes out of a mix of the two.

While occasionally controversial, these characteristics are precisely why shows like these are ahead of their time and will soon be the future of comedy and entertainment as we know it. Every few decades, (very approximately) there has been a shift in entertainment. It has gone from live theater to radio to television to YouTube to streaming to TikTok and thus, in an age where any content we want is endlessly at our literal fingertips, it feels like this has led to fewer risks and new, original ideas. As a result, in film and television, we face an onslaught of sequels, reboots, and spin-offs that prompt the question of how much of a good thing is too much. (Why are they remaking “Wizards of Waverly Place?”) There is simply so much out there these days—and usually multiple ways to access it—that it sometimes seems more difficult for original shows to build a following the way “The Sopranos” and “Glee” did.

This rut doesn’t exactly mean entertainment is doomed. Movies and TV are still relatively recent mediums, both a little over a century old. Both constantly evolve. It seems like we are on the verge of one of these aforementioned shifts, which I predict, or at least want to predict, will lead to a radical deconstruction of genre and the way it structures what we watch. It will all be thanks to comedy, or so at least I hope. 

The deconstruction of the comedy genre is not groundbreaking. Another recent successful mixed-genre comedy is the mighty “Succession,” which could’ve garnered a whole other article. I think this practice will only continue to grow, potentially going on to cement comedy in its rightful place as a key building block in almost any television show. Comedy is the perfect genre in which to break the rules, seeing as people don’t take it seriously already, and so there is room to be playful in a way that won’t make people angry for ruining it. If something is funny, audiences will laugh. Amazing things happen when television breaks the rules of what comedy is supposed to be, and I am excited to see what else can be done when we truly consider the artistic and experimental value of comedy television. 

Emma Kendall can be reached at erkendall@wesleyan.edu.