“They’re the future.” – Turbo
Sometimes I feel bad for sports talk radio DJs. In my hometown of Baltimore, between February and August the airwaves are full of Orioles talk. It has to be extremely frustrating (especially for DJs who aren’t fans of the O’s) to have to come up with different ways of saying, “This team sucks, but they have a little bit of potential,” for hours on end, day after day. As a TV critic, I often find myself struggling with a similar dilemma — trying to find new and creative ways of writing about shows that just aren’t that great. Glory Daze is one of those shows. It’s not that I hate Glory Daze, quite the opposite in fact. I really want to like it, but it’s very difficult to do when every episode fails to live up to its potential. GD is like the Daniel Cabrera of cable shows.
It’s as if the folks behind the show can’t see what the show does well and what it sucks at doing. Glory Daze tries too hard. It packs each episode with a bunch of wacky stories and hi-jinx when it would be better served just letting the characters hang out. The guys on the show are genuinely likable, so it is not necessary to put one or all of them through the gauntlet on a weekly basis.
One of the plots in “Hit Me With Your Test Shot” revolves around Turbo working as a DJ for the school’s soft rock radio station. Jason accompanies him to the studio and the two get to talking about music. Turbo hips Jason to this new fangled thing called “hip-hop” and throws a Rakim record on. Jason, the lily-white WASP, loves what he hears and he and Turbo have a little popping and locking session in the studio. This is an example of the show doing something well — two characters in a room talking, listening to tunes and dancing like robots. No slapstick necessary.
The other secondary plot highlights one of the show’s annoying little habits. The writers don’t seem to know how to utilize the show’s 1986 setting. Some episodes feature very few cues that would let the viewer know that Glory Daze takes place in the ’80s, and it might as well be set in 2011. Other times, Glory Daze tries to shoe-horn something ’80s into an episode, as if to justify the choice of setting the show in 1986. This week, the ’80s tidbit is the famous Bill Buckner blunder in the World Series. Eli meets a sexy Sox fan (as if there was such a thing, go O’s!) in his dorm and decides that pretending to like the Sox will help him weasel his way into her Boston jersey. It works, and she promises that if the Sox win, she will let Eli round the bases. Well, we all know what happens next. The Sox lose and Eli remains a virgin. The Curse of The Bambino strikes again.
Most of the episode is devoted to Joel and Brian as they attempt to infiltrate the forbidden temple that is a sorority house. Joel lets Christie borrow his notes for Professor Haine’s class only to discover that he forgot to remove an incriminating doodle he drew of her. Joel and Brian sneak into the house where Christie is studying with a group of friends and steal back the notes. Joel doesn’t realize that Christie has made a copy of the drawing and seems flattered by it. With only a couple of episodes left, it finally looks like Joel might score his dream girl.
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.