Original Song
Rachel (Lea Michele) tries to repair her relationship with Finn (Cory Monteith) and faces off with Quinn (Dianna Agron).
The musical performances, cover versions, and original songs in the episode were met with generally positive reviews from critics.
Upon its initial airing, this episode was viewed by 11.15 million American viewers and garnered a 4.2/13 rating/share in the 18-49 demographic, according to the Nielsen ratings.
Rachel's (Lea Michele) second attempt at an original song, "Only Child", proves to be only a small improvement over "My Headband".
Quinn's (Dianna Agron) desire to become prom queen prompts her to get close to Rachel in order to run interference between her and Finn.
The two are interrupted by Sue, finding that she has filled their lockers with dirt, an event later brought up during the glee club's song writing session.
In rehearsal, director Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) passes out rhyming dictionaries to help the glee club with songwriting.
After the club members share recent hurtful anecdotes by Sue, he writes "Loser Like Me" on the board, deciding that could be the title for the yet-unwritten song.
The judges for this year's Regionals competition are local broadcasting legend Rod Remington (Bill A. Jones), Tea Party candidate and home schooler Tammy Jean Albertson (Kathy Griffin), and former exotic dancer Sister Mary Constance (Loretta Devine).
Aural Intensity opens the competition with "Jesus Is My Friend", a song that Sue selected to cater specifically to the judges.
The New Directions respond to Sue's bullying with their second original song, "Loser like Me", an anthem dedicated to the underdogs of high school.
The casting notice for Tammy Jean described her as "a middle-aged recent Tea Party candidate and home schooler — a Sarah Palin type",[1] while Sister Mary Constance is a former stripper.
[2] Kathy Griffin and Loretta Devine were cast to guest-star as Regionals judges Tammy Jean Albertson and Sister Mary Constance respectively.
Recurring characters who appear include New Directions members Mike Chang (Harry Shum, Jr.), Sam Evans (Chord Overstreet), Lauren Zizes (Ashley Fink), and Blaine Anderson (Darren Criss), the lead singer of the Dalton Academy Warblers.
Prior to this episode, most of Glee's musical performances were cover versions, and by October 2009 he had received offers from multiple songwriters willing to devise original tracks.
[4] These plans did not come to fruition, nor did a December 2009 claim by OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder that he had been recruited by Glee's music supervisor, Adam Anders, to write an original song for the series.
[5] Murphy later stated that he planned to showcase original music during the second season, aiming to find a way for this to occur organically, as: "It wouldn’t work [before] if they just broke out and started singing their own songs.
[9] In the episode, "Loser Like Me" was performed by New Directions, with club co-captains Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) and Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith) on lead vocals.
[10] According to the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers database, co-writers on the song include Anders, Peer Åström, Savan Kotecha, and Johan Schuster.
[8][12] The episode also features cover versions of Pink's "Raise Your Glass", Maroon 5's "Misery", The Beatles's "Blackbird", Hey Monday's "Candles", and Sonseed's "Jesus Is My Friend".
It's the opposite of what one might think, because the demands of those episodes—more and longer songs than usual, judges' deliberations, the competition scenes themselves—might be likely to crowd out character stories.
Instead, like a singer overcoming nerves, the moment usually seems to focus Glee, and while "Original Song" was not an all-time great, it was generally a solid episode that did well by a couple of ongoing relationship stories."
James Poniewozik of Time called it a "solid" episode and wrote that "it did well by a couple of ongoing relationship stories.
"[20] Amy Reiter of the Los Angeles Times opined that it delivered several "long-anticipated moments [...] and several more we only wish we'd thought to anticipate.
[25] Brett Berk of Vanity Fair praised the episode for "not only [...] retreating into the series’s standard, flailing, everybody-in-the-pool narrative template, or filling this metaphorical slough with more leaden tropes than Richard Serra circa 1968, but by having the results be precisely the inevitabilities we all knew would occur.
This neat moment captured the show’s conceit: taking something ugly and oppressive and turning it into something beautiful and celebratory.
It’s long overdue and it will silence the growing legion of critics out there who were unhappy with the pace of this story and why Kurt always seemed to be stuck in pure misery.
[26] In her review for the episode, Erica Futterman of Rolling Stone praised the song, and called it a "true anthem" that "ends triumphantly".
"[24] Gonzalez gave the highest grade to the cover versions of "Misery" and "Raise Your Glass", both performed by the Dalton Academy Warblers.
[35] Four covers from the episode were featured on the album Glee: The Music Presents the Warblers, which was released on April 19, 2011, and all four charted in the top 100 in the US,[34] Australia,[40] and Canada:[35] "Misery", "Blackbird", "Candles", and "Raise Your Glass".
