THE POWER OF MADONNA

I have to agree with my boyfriend on this one, The Power of Madonna Glee episode definitely deserves an Emmy Award. Director/Writer Ryan Murphy really pulled it off with this episode. The structure of Glee is to find the songs that match the characters "inner voice," like all good musicals should. As a series, Glee succeeds on many levels. I personally think of it as a satiric comedy with some musical numbers. I laugh more than I sing during each episode. Regardless, from a production standpoint, this has to be one of the hardest working casts in TV production today. They have to learn their lines, choreography, songs, and record all at the same time. Also, the producers of the show have no small task basically staging an hour long musical every episode.

Mr Murphy's episode succeed on many levels. It would have been the easy way out to just take some Madonna songs and have the actors just sing through them, but Ryan took the entire message of Madonna and wrote it into the episode. The women were to be empowered. Madonna's songs are all about being strong and independent no matter your gender. And from there, the theme of Madonna, the songs of Madonna all moved the story of the characters forward. The staging of the musical numbers was great. And every song consistently worked throughout the show. It was a great Glee episode first, and an homage second. I'm sure Madonna loved it. And Mr. Murphy also gets credit for faithfully recreating the Vogue music video almost shot by shot, and shooting it in the middle of an episode already packed with 3 big production numbers. Mr. Murphy should get the Emmy Award for Best Directing. Mr. Murphy should get a matching Emmy for Best Written Episode. He used his script and the music to make the episode better with the 2 combined rather than using great writing or a great song and give one more weight that the other. Ryan is also doing a great job balancing a large cast and fully utilizing all of their talents.

I think if you can write a CSI episode, you can pretty much write almost any criminal procedural show. And writing for TV is hard. But not every TV writer can successfully write an episode of Glee. I was glad I pre-downloaded the entire album.