Now that Glee's wrapped up its freshman season, everyone wants to know what the writers have planned for season two. Executive producer Ryan Murphy has promised that the show will add three more characters to its already overstuffed cast: love interests for both Kurt and Mercedes, as well as a Christian moralist who'll go toe-to-toe with Rachel. My question is, do they really need to add new actors when some of those roles could go to its two most underserved actors?
Harry Shum Jr. and Dijon Talton haven't had much to do on the show besides dance and fill out the rest of the glee club -- in fact, it's regarded as a major event whenever one of them gets a single line in an episode. While that could be a disadvantage for the actors, who work hard with little recognition, it could have been treated as a boon for the writers when figuring out their next season.
After all, Murphy keeps saying that he wants Kurt's love interest to be a regular jock who's still coming out of the closet -- so why don't they just use Talton's Matt Rutherford for that, since the fact that he's a football player is one of the few things we know about him? As for Mercedes, her song-belting would be a great counterpoint to the fleet footwork of Shum's Mike Chang -- and what a good-looking couple they'd be! Plus, we know he can sing -- as Shum told Movieline, "I did a lot of musicals when I was younger, but I also did a lot of singing in the bathroom."
Alas, it looks like there will be even less room for Talton and Shum next season; not only have their fellow barely-there counterparts Naya Rivera (Santana) and Heather Morris (Brittany) been upgraded to full-time regulars, but the show has the onus of serving the three new players it'll be bringing in.
Look, I get what Glee is trying to do by hiring these new actors. The open casting call is a great way to build buzz, and it gets the already devoted audience even more invested in these newbies if they watch them rise through the ranks of their very public auditions. I also understand that Glee's current cast is tremendously overworked, and they probably wouldn't mind some more time off if other actors came in to shoulder the burden. I just think that the show could better use the resources it already has. Why not give Mike Chang and Matt Rutherford something to sing about?