On John Rogers’ recommendation, I finally got around to watching I’ve Loved You So Long, written and directed by Philippe Claudel. It’s a beautiful and haunting picture; without giving away too much, it concerns a woman named Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) as she attempts to live her life after a stay in prison. Her struggle to reconstitute her identity intertwines with our own discovery of her as a person; she starts off as a blank slate but drips and drabs of detail shade our understanding of her character. In the end, although we cannot claim to really know her, we are in an entirely different place with her. In that way, it’s the quintessential character study.

Anyway, I bring up I’ve Loved You So Long because I want to discuss Glee, the new Fox high school musical comedy from showrunner Ryan Murphy (I’m sure Mr. Claudel would be flattered). I’ve Loved You So Long got me thinking about character, in that prisons are institutions that systematically dehumanize its occupants and strip them of their personalities. The draw of many prison stories is the struggle by the protagonist to defend and reclaim her identity in the face of such dehumanization. This struggle is what makes prisoners compelling characters.

But what is character? In most mainstream narratives, especially on television, character is the central element. Plots can be too complex and murky, shifting from episode to episode; characters are the constant, relatable and understandable to the end.  Themes can be too abstract and subtle for audiences to really connect with; characters are real and concrete, and serve as the foundation on which everything is built. To write television, you have to write character.

In my own writing, when I try to come up with and flesh out a character, I go through a systematic process borne from a combination of my study of Hitchcock and a dangerously unhealthy level of gaming. Let’s take a character — call her Mikayla Steele. Characters are defined by their internal and external conflicts: Mikayla is on the run from taxpayer-funded AIG death squads. Her talents and skills are the tools she uses to solve her conflicts: let’s say Mikayla is an Olympic-class alpine skier. Her personality colors how she will react to her conflicts, and in this case Mikayla is supremely confident and arrogant. Then her connections to other people and groups of people define the scope of that conflict, and can help or hinder her journey. Let’s say Mikayla works for the IRS and her dad is an Iroquois shaman. Finally, little quirks might not pertain directly to Mikayla’s conflict, but they serve as little grace notes to give her texture: Mikayla’s a big fan of Bon Jovi, and has framed posters of JBJ all over her house.

There you go: Arrogant half-Iroquois IRS agent Mikayla Steele, skiing away from AIG assassins to the tune of “Livin’ on a Prayer”, and she’s ready for the next big Hollywood blockbuster. [†]

Of course, there are other ways to structure a character, some wildly different from the above. The point to take away from this is that while we like to imagine our own identity as some integral, indivisible whole, everyone else perceives us as a collection of traits, and vice versa. Character is constructed by collective perception; anyone who’s seen a Wikipedia page built from the ground up knows this firsthand. For example, look at Barack Obama’s Wikipedia page five years ago and compare it to his page today. Whether we are discussing a real person or a fictional character, each is defined by an external image-conception of identity. And people are positively obsessed with image.

Showrunner Ryan Murphy knows this for a fact; most of his work revolves around a critical examination of this image-conception of identity. His detractors accuse him of many things, but one thing they can’t accuse him of is being boring. Murphy loves to play in the extremes of both form and content — this means that at its height, his work is incisive and groundbreaking. When it plunges off the deep end, it enters into a world of over-the-top cartoonish buffoonery, shocking us for the sake of shock.

All of that describes Nip/Tuck, whose core theme has always been how the American obsession of identity-shaping through changing our image threatens to turn us into a nation of homogenized pap and a gallery of grotesques. This is symbolized physically through the cavalcade of plastic surgery patients who believe that through the eponymous nip and tuck they can be better people; but more importantly it comes through the psychology of the surgeons who perform the work. Sean McNamara wants to be an example, a better surgeon and better person than most; but in the end he’s just another selfish philanderer and failed father. Christian Troy (Julian MacMahon) starts the series as a hotshot Miami plastic surgeon, and ends up a hotshot Hollywood plastic surgeon who is raped by a serial killer, suffers from breast cancer, marries a lesbian, and kills an AIDS patient by literally screwing her off the edge of a high-rise.

This focus on image and the grotesque is evident in Murphy’s other work, the flawed-but-entertaining coming-of-age story Running With Scissors and the vastly-underrated high school show Popular, which can be seen as a precursor to Glee. Characters in literature can be classified as flat or round. Flat characters are stock, and can be entirely defined in a few words (such as a half-Iroquois IRS agent). Round characters are complex and unpredictable, with multiple layers and reserves of nuance (like Juliette in I’ve Loved You So Long). Prison stories are interesting because they are about a system attempting to force round characters to be flat. High schools are the opposite of prisons (although the students might tell you otherwise) in that they are where flat characters become round. For the most part, children and their stories are all the same: they are usually precocious, usually mischievous, and always cute. But high school stories have such a draw because they coincide with a time when these children start to differentiate themselves. It’s when a confusing and peril-laden understanding of sexuality rears its head; it’s when a person’s hopes and dreams start to take form and come into conflict with the outside world; it’s when kids become intensely conscious of their images.

Murphy’s work, especially Popular, gains its power by challenging the fundamental assumption that we all had in high school: that we were the only round characters in a sea of flat ones. Popular often contrived situations in which the stereotypical high school cliches (the spoiled rich girl, the airheaded jock, the brainy outsider) were taken outside their comfort zones and forced to confront each other as three-dimensional people instead of one-line caricatures. And that automatically made it better than the vast majority of high school stories on television.

Glee continues in this tradition for another class of high school students; new trappings such as MySpace have made things more immediate and hyperreal (all the better for Murphy), but the overarching themes remain the same. An Ohio high school teacher, Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), re-organizes the school’s glee club and brings in the requisite bunch of misfits — Rachel the prima donna (Lea Michele), the sassy black chick, the gay kid, the handicapped kid, the Asian kid, and the unlikely jock-cum-divo Finn (Cory Monteith). All stock characters, to be sure, but Ryan Murphy keeps up the satiric edge by giving his characters awareness of their constructed identities: As Rachel records her latest MySpace video, she muses that “Nowadays, being anonymous is worse than being poor… fame is the most important thing in our culture”, and the pivotal moment of the episode is when Finn declares “I’m not afraid of being called a loser because that’s what I am.” The central characters all see glee club as a way to define their identities, and even Will is not immune; for him, the glee club rekindles a part of his past that he had sloughed off long ago.

The show is rounded out by a comically talented cast: Jessalyn Gilsig, an effervescently skilled Murphy regular and victim of the aforementioned sex-induced defenestration, plays Terri, Will’s henpecking materialistic wife; while elfin Jayma Mays shines as Emma, Will’s OCD-riddled colleague and potential love interest. Jane Lynch, Ken Tanaka, and Iqbal Theba fill out the rest of the school’s demented faculty.

Detractors of Glee criticize the show for being cliche-ridden and shallow: High School Musical with jokes about engorged prostates and waterboarding thrown in. But a television pilot is a little like the first day of high school, with everything thrown at you at once and with all the new people you meet being little more than names and faces. You need time to get to know them. And Ryan Murphy is a master of sending characters in the most interesting directions — Popular started out as the rivalry between the pretty rich girl and the just-as-pretty outsider girl, and that show ended up performing the most elaborate of narrative contortions. Glee will most likely end up exploring its characters in the same way.

Oh yeah, there’s singing too. And it’s pretty good.

[†] Mikayla Steele is licensed under Creative Commons 3.0-Attribution. You have permission to use her in any work as long as you credit me. And you know you want to…