Rise: A Musical Disappointment

When I saw the first preview for the new show Rise, I was excited.  Airing Tuesdays at 9pm EST, Rise is NBC's attempt to hold onto the huge viewership of This is Us, after that show ended its second season last week.  While This is Us tugs on the heartstrings with time jumping family drama, Rise aims to do the same with the coming-of-age story of a diverse group of high school students led in their theater department by earnest young teacher Lou Mazzuchelli (Josh Radnor).  Creator Jason Katims also made two of my all-time favorite dramas, Friday Night Lights and Parenthood, so I was pre-programmed to like Rise.  But, judging by the pilot episode alone, Rise is a preachy mess of a show, a huge disappointment and rare misstep for Katims.

In addition to Radnor, the cast of Rise is made up of a variety of mostly-unknown actors.  Auli'i Cravalho is Lilette, the female protagonist and star of the school's production of Spring Awakening.  She works a waitressing job to help her poor family make ends meet, and she's embarrassed by her promiscuous mom Vanessa (Shirley Rumierk), who is having an affair with the school's football coach Sam Strickland (Joe Tippett).  Cravalho and Rumierk do an okay job in their roles, but neither are particularly memorable or captivating onscreen.  In a plot stolen directly from the pilot of Glee, Damon J. Gillespie is Robbie, the star quarterback of the football team who Lou recruits for the musical after hearing him rap at a pep rally.  Thorne is fine, but again he doesn't really stand out enough to be the convincing male lead of the show (or of the musical within the show).  There's also Coach Strickland's daughter Gwen (Amy Forsyth), who's dealing with family problems caused by her dad's affair, and Masshous (Rarmian Newton), a homeless student and lighting designer for the theater department who secretly lives at school until Lou takes him into his home.  Rounding out the main cast are Marley Shelton as Lou's supportive wife Gail, Rosie Perez as Lou's assistant director Tracey, who at first holds a grudge that her lead director job was stolen by Lou, and Simon (Ted Sutherland), a closeted gay student who is afraid of disappointing his conservative Catholic family by kissing another boy in the musical.  Of these actors, Sutherland's performance as Simon is the most compelling.  In the pilot Simon isn't yet ready to admit or accept the fact that he's gay, and Sutherland effectively portrays his internal struggle and deep desire not to disappoint his family.  It's also worth mentioning supporting character Michael Hallowell (Ellie Desautels), a female-to-male transgender student who Lou recruits for the musical after needing more male actors.  Michael plays a very small role in the pilot, but it's interesting to see a young transgender character on network tv, even if not in a lead role.  On the flip side, Perez's role is especially puzzling.  She's known for her over-the-top funny characters in films like White Men Can't Jump and It Could Happen to You, but here she doesn't seem to have any trace of humor and does nothing to stand out.  Maybe this is her attempt to be taken seriously as a more dramatic actress, but so far it's not working. 

The biggest problem with Rise is its extreme earnestness.  Glee worked (at least in the beginning) because of its campy humor.  The writing was sharp, and many of the actors (particularly Jane Lynch as Coach Sue Sylvester) played their characters in an over-the-top cartoonishly funny way.  But there's none of that humor on Rise.  The show is way too serious, and the kids don't even seem like they're having that much fun rehearsing for the musical.  Katim's other shows, and even the weep-fest This is Us, have some funny moments to balance out the heartwarming ones, and Rise desperately needs some of this humor if it has any hope of connecting with viewers.  You'd think that having a former sitcom star on the show (Radnor) would help in this regard, but that's far from the case.  I've never been a fan of Radnor, and this show does nothing to change that opinion.  I didn't find him to be very funny on How I Met Your Mother, and his boyish cheesy romantic charm nearly ruined that show for me.  Even though Radnor is now in his 40s and plays a married man with 3 older children on Rise, he still seems like an unsure young boy and doesn't have a very commanding presence on the show.  The show would benefit from a stronger actor and more powerful teacher figure to lead the more inexperienced younger actors/characters, similar to Kyle Chandler as Coach Eric Taylor on Friday Night Lights.  It also seems a bit unsure about how much music to incorporate into the plot.  Glee was able to put its own spin on popular songs with multiple musical numbers per episode (making a lot of money on album sales in the process), but so far Rise has included very little music for a show about a musical.  At the end of the pilot there was a message encouraging viewers to download music from the show, but I was confused because there hadn't seemed to be much music at all (or if there was, it clearly wasn't memorable).  I'm willing to give this show a shot because I have been such a big fan of Katim's work in the past, but it needs to step things up in a major way very soon, or it will be a distant memory by the next tv season.