Glee was a tone-deaf horror show – but Naya Rivera made it sing

In the last month, courtesy of resurfaced clips of staggering bad taste and allegations about star Lea Michele’s awful behaviour on set, the internet has been reminded of one undeniable truth: Glee was a train wreck. For a few years at the start of the last decade, the relentlessly upbeat comedy-drama series was also a bona fide pop-culture phenomenon – albeit cloying, exhausting and filled with monstrous musical-theatre nerds wailing their way through adolescence.

Buried in between poor autotune and sledgehammer plotting, however, was a spark plug by the name of Naya Rivera. Tragically, it’s only in death that she seems to be getting the credit she so often deserved.

Rivera, who is believed to have drowned while swimming in a California lake, was never meant to play Glee’s best character. At first her on-screen alter ego, Santana Lopez, was a glorified extra: the bitchy back-up stooge to the show’s central popular girl. But, like an ambitious drama student hungry for the spotlight, she clawed her way out of the background. Not because she necessarily wanted to, but because her sheer star power demanded it.

Over the course of the show’s succeeding seasons, Santana deepened and evolved, becoming Glee’s most well-rounded and entertaining protagonist and the vessel for its most emotional storytelling. Even if we were never supposed to like her so much.

For a show so often driven by ideas of tolerance and equality, Glee was also oddly rigid in its moral binaries. There were heroes on Glee and there were villains on Glee, if not based on behaviour but because the show’s writers, specifically series co-creator Ryan Murphy (of American Horror Story and Pose fame), told us so.

No matter how often Michele’s aspiring Broadway queen Rachel Berry behaved like a brat or a bully, she was our de facto star, and therefore faultless. By the time Glee ended, with a flash-forward revealing Rachel won the Tony Award she’d always dreamed of, it only avoided being annoying because it felt so boringly inevitable.

Santana, and by proxy Rivera, was engaging because the show never beat us around the head with her apparent greatness. She was an incredible singer who nobody on the show insisted was an incredible singer. She was its most complex character not because of the storylines given to her (they made just as little sense most of the time as everyone else’s), but because Rivera somehow always made Santana’s choices believable.

Her most important arc, involving her gradual acceptance of her sexuality and her relationship with her best friend Brittany, was powerful because Rivera understood the volatility that comes with adolescent love – the self-loathing, the infatuation and the petty jealousies.

Santana was also the only major Glee character who wasn’t ear-splittingly annoying. Whether it was because she always had the funniest lines, or that Rivera radiated a glorious apathy towards her fellow cast members, it made her scenes crackle with unpredictability. One of her final major scenes on the show involved her delivering a shower of insults upon the show’s most irritating character, Chris Colfer’s unbearable Kurt Hummel, and Rivera tore into it as if it were a four-course meal.

Rivera had the most on-screen experience of the show’s young cast when it began, having been acting in TV sitcoms since the age of four. She also understood the show’s melodrama, and the precise timing that elevated angsty teen drama into soap opera glitziness. One of the Glee’s most dramatic moments involved Santana delivering an immaculately-timed slap to the face to another character – it was a gesture she improvised on set, capping a tour de force scene in which she had already belted one half of an Adele mash-up and then angrily confronted the boy who outed her as a lesbian earlier in the episode. It remains Rivera’s greatest scene on the show.

Frustratingly, she was never asked to demonstrate that kind of power again. Rivera got less and less to do as Glee went on, amid rumours of a cast fallout and repeated clashes with Michele. In 2014, it was reported that she had been written out of the show’s fifth season finale, and wouldn’t return for season six. Both Rivera’s representatives and Glee’s production company Fox denied the claims, and she would ultimately return for a handful of season six episodes, but it left a stain on her reputation.

As more and more gossip emerges from the making of the show, from accusations levelled at Michele to producer Marti Noxon indicating that many of the show’s young stars were behaving badly behind the scenes, it makes Rivera’s early ostracisation feel even more unfair. When Glee was on the air, much of the gossip revolved around Rivera exclusively – an early tabloid tale suggested she had keyed the car of one of her co-stars, Mark Salling, who she was dating at the time and who had allegedly cheated on her.

She was also regularly painted as an instigator of drama with Michele. The recent outpouring of allegations against Michele herself, however, make that seem if not untrue then at least slightly exaggerated.

A sanctimonious air surrounded much of Glee and many of its cast members; a self-righteous faux-innocence that always inspired eye rolls. Rivera, to her credit, never pretended to be anything that she wasn’t, and didn’t shy away from the rumours that surrounded her. Her 2016 memoir, Sorry Not Sorry, is an acidic, frothy read, filled with bracing honesty and catty humour. She didn’t key Salling’s car, she insisted, she actually slathered it in dog food, eggs and bird seed. Yes, she had flings with her co-stars, but so did everybody. “The Glee cast had the sex drive of bunnies and the bed-hopping skills of a polygamist cult,” she writes, while providing a hint that she could have had a fantastic second career as a Jackie Collins-esque novelist.

The time Rivera was nearly fired ahead of Glee season six? Apparently she had yelled at a producer after he allowed an unnamed actress to throw a tantrum and hold up production. As for Michele? “I think Rachel — erm, I mean Lea — didn’t like sharing the spotlight,” Rivera writes. “Sometimes it seemed like she blamed me for anything and everything that went wrong.”

She was slightly ahead of her time. In comparison to 2016, we welcome that kind of honesty now, particularly when so much of recent Hollywood discourse has been about how power on film sets is weaponised. The Michele allegations of late, particularly her alleged disdain for extras and guest stars, also provided an insight into the dynamics on the Glee set. It’s not difficult to theorise that someone like Rivera, who rose through the ranks of the show’s cast solely based on her unexpected magnetism, could have been interpreted as a threat or interloper, or in a space where she didn’t belong.

While the internet, and many of Michele’s Glee co-stars, commented on the allegations that surrounded her last month, Rivera kept a notably dignified silence. In truth, her recent social media presence is incredibly drama-free. There were selfies, photographs of her four-year-old son Josey and promotion for her YouTube series, a spin-off of the Step Up movies. “I cannot wait to start filming the new season,” she wrote in May. “We’re going to bring it like never before!” It seemed, more than ever, that she was eager to turn a new page.

Even before Rivera’s death, Glee was a difficult show to talk about in 2020, let alone rewatch. Beyond the tone-deaf horror of much of its storytelling, and how often it wrapped hideous stereotyping, misogyny and racism in progressive packaging, it rapidly felt ugly as a pop culture memory.

Rivera is the third main cast member to die under tragic circumstances in less than seven years. On July 13 2013, seven years to the day before Rivera's body was found, original male lead Cory Monteith was found dead in a Vancouver hotel room after overdosing on heroin. In 2015, mere months after Glee came to a close, Salling was charged with possession of child pornography. He would take his own life two years later.

Such tragedy in such quick succession, coupled with a number of minor cast scandals and the relatively underwhelming careers most of its stars have had in its aftermath, had already led to a vaguely unpleasant meme surrounding the so-called “curse of Glee”. It left the show with an unshakeable cloud over it, one only darker in the wake of Rivera. Watch Glee over again and, no matter the go-go peppiness it so often exhibited, you’re constantly reminded of grisly death.

Or, if you’re somehow able to shake that, wondering whether it was this episode that Michele allegedly told a co-star she would “s--t in her wig”. Or was it that episode where the extra allegedly thrown off the set at Michele’s behest was brought back after it was discovered she was related to Barbra Streisand?

It’s arguable that Rivera’s death has made Glee worth revisiting, though. YouTube is filled with lengthy edits of Santana’s bitchiest lines, or sepia-coloured odes to her relationship with Brittany, but it’s also interesting to watch her character’s journey in its totality.

You can marvel at the confidence Rivera always seemed to possess, the levity she provided Santana in her quietest moments, and the potency of her character’s queen-bee rage. There’s the starry-eyed fabulousness of her rendition of America from West Side Story. Beyond all the tragedy, she was the show’s shiniest performer and most fascinating presence, an actress with heaps of untapped potential.

There she goes again. Even in death, Naya Rivera is rescuing Glee from total oblivion.