#beth corcoran

Season One

Before the series, Shelby serves as a surrogate for Hiram and LeRoy Berry, and signs a contract agreeing to no contact with Rachel until Rachel was eighteen. At the time (she was in her early twenties, it seems) she went along with this, but came to regret it. 

(There is some confusion as to specific details, at some points it’s said Shelby gave Rachel up for adoption, but at the same time in season one, these were Rachel’s parents:

So one of them is Jeff Goldblum. Let’s just agree Rachel was conceived in a time paradox and move on).

Shelby, a good singer (I mean, she’s Idina Menzel), ended up coaching Vocal Adrenaline and leading them to multiple national wins. At Sectionals in S1, she saw Rachel perform, which brought her regrets to the front of her mind and she decided she wanted to know her daughter, contract be damned. Rather than directly go after her, and face legal consequences, she asked Jesse to get a feel for if Rachel would want to know her, and to give her a message if so. Jesse does so, and she hears that Rachel is interested in meeting her. 

They were in contact, openly, for a time - Rachel did want to know her mother, and Shelby was glad to be with her, but it soon faltered, and ended with Shelby cutting ties and leaving Lima.

Season One Thoughts

This story is genuinely compelling to me, but part of that might be from how I watched it - I do wonder what it would have been like week by week, and would need to double check to see how well a lot of the themes are conveyed. I think if you view the arc as a simple “Rachel wants to know her mom and Shelby backs out,” I can understand a lot of bitterness towards Shelby.

What the show does though, is deconstruct that. Glee, especially for the first five seasons, is never a straightforward ‘dreams come true’ narrative. There’s always something wrong. You could look at Quinn having a firm idea of what she wants her life to be like, and not actually enjoying any of the reality. You could look at Will’s storybook romance with his high school sweetheart and how that ended. You could look at the whole S1 finale, and how it’s predicated on the New Directions losing. Then there’s the finales for seasons 3 and 5, standing in defiance to the idea that your dreams coming true will be as simple or as easy or as satisfying as you imagine. 

Shelby and Rachel both want something - and what they want is something they can’t get.

Shelby doesn’t want her daughter, she wants the baby she gave up fifteen years ago. Rachel doesn’t want Shelby, she wants to have had the ideal mother in her head. Shelby trying to be that for Rachel would be an act of selfishness. Rachel isn’t the daughter Shelby wanted - you don’t get a redo, she gave Rachel away fifteen years ago and there’s no second shot. Trying to somehow make a fifteen year old fill the same niche as her baby would be abuse. And then for Rachel, she’s always going to be looking for that history, that connection, with Shelby - and Shelby isn’t going to be able to magic up a relationship. The two of them are strangers, more than mother and daughter. 

(I’m jumping ahead, but it’s worth saying that in season 4, Shelby pops by to see Rachel, and Rachel calls her ‘Shelby,’ not ‘mom.’ They aren’t mother and daughter on anything more than a biological level) 

Sometimes toxic relationships aren’t a result of malevolence, but of two people fundamentally needing different things. So Shelby does the mature thing, and puts that distance between them, because if she doesn’t draw that line then Rachel is going to start spiralling. 

(And, of course, then Shelby goes on to adopt Beth so that she can have the experience of raising a baby. It’s not the same, but it is closer). 

Season Two

Shelby doesn’t appear. We can extrapolate a few things though - she raises Beth in New York as a single mother, though sees little showbusiness success. 

Which brings us to season three.

First though, I’m going to ramble a little. This probably deserves its own essay at some point, but season one and season three feel like the same show to me - season two is very distinct. 

Season 1B saw a spike in viewers compared to 1A after a chance for word of mouth to spread, and S2 would have offered the same - people hear about the show when it’s not on, and tune in when it starts up again. This was Glee’s heyday. This is just me speculating, but I do wonder how many people saw S2 as what Glee ought to be, or as the bit that best represented their tastes, when it was very much an aberration in the show’s run. 

Notably, season two is almost completely devoid of the thematic beats that made season one so interesting to me - which season three brings back in a big way, and in a way that is central to Shelby’s arc. Lacking that context, it’s easy to see some already-dubious decisions seeming far worse to people for whom season two was so iconic. 

Season Three

So here we go. Shelby is offered ostensibly a huge amount of money to come back to Lima, and help coach a rival show choir. Having apparently seen little success, as a single mother, she takes the chance. 

Back at McKinley, Shelby coaches the Troubletones, and seems to be a welcoming teacher. Obviously though, the big dynamic is with Quinn and Puck, whose baby she’s raising. She sees herself in Quinn, and wants to give her the experience she once wanted - to have a chance to know her baby. Unambiguously though, early-S3 Quinn is not in a good place; she’s violent, cutting off friendships, self-destructive, and legitimately criminal at points. (I mean for crying out loud, she tries to plant stuff in Shelby’s apartment to get Beth taken away. Quinn is in a bad place). 

Throughout it all, Shelby is remarkably restrained, always trying for sympathy rather than anger. Like, make no mistake, Quinn could so easily be expelled, if not more, for some of the stuff she pulls - and Shelby is quiet, and still leaves Beth on the table. She doesn’t want to trust her baby to someone currently not in the right headspace to look after another person, and is trying to keep boundaries to prevent another Rachel situation, but she wants Quinn to have the chance she didn’t. 

Which, yeah, then we get to Puck. Honestly Puck’s someone else that probably merits an essay, still untangling how I feel there, but as far as this arc goes, Puck ends up attracted to Shelby, and she explicitly turns him down several times. Until a health scare with Beth sees her panic, and she sleeps with him, and while she is undeniably not in her right mind from that situation, it is absolutely something she should not have done. Puck is eighteen, as the show points out, but he is still a student and she is a teacher and there is no mindset where she should accept his advances.

There isn’t explicit resolution here, which is a shame. Quinn almost turns Shelby in, but decides not to - you can have your own opinions on that, where I fall is ‘Quinn doesn’t think Shelby’s ever going to do anything like that again, and wants Beth to have a mother who can look after her.’ Personal morality kinda has to be left at the door to deal with Glee characters, so I just go by whether I can buy the characters acting the way they do.

Shelby leaves town after this. Ostensibly, she is on better terms with Quinn - and Quinn gets good development over the rest of the season, though beyond a shot of a photo in Quinn’s locker (that she must have received from Shelby, indicating communication) I don’t think Beth gets mentioned again. 

Which is where the recap ends. So!

Season Three Thoughts

Yeah, a lot to unpack here. 

One of the things I find interesting about Shelby, is that a lot of the time she ends up in situations in which there really is no good option. In season one, the moment she decided to seek out Rachel, the only two outcomes were short-term heartbreak of Rachel missing her or saying goodbye, or the long-term decline of Shelby consistently failing to be able to be what Rachel wanted and needed her to be. One can condemn Shelby’s decision to violate the contract and seeking to contact Rachel soon after Sectionals, but it is at least a sympathetic mistake. 

And then season three, right from the start we’re on an inevitable pathway to bad. 

Step one, Shelby’s offered a well-paying job in a field she’s good at. She’s a single mom, paying New York rent, jumping at the chance for a payday is understandable, potentially even necessary. Plus it’s a job that means she can spend more time with her daughter. 

Step two, okay, back in Lima, back at McKinley. Does she firmly draw lines and not interact with Rachel, Quinn and Puck, or at least limit such interactions to a professional context? Well, that’s not really feasible, non-interactions are still interactions and it would come off the same as simple rejection. Anything she does here will have an effect. 

And she’s Shelby, her whole arc in season one was processing the fact she misses the daughter she never got to know. Of course she’d want to offer the same chance, when it comes to Quinn - she sees herself in Quinn. 

S3E2, I Am Unicorn: “I know what happened to you. Same thing happened to me, when I gave up Rachel. I went with a Regis Philbin tattoo and the Sinead O’Connor haircut.”

She’s been where Quinn is. She isn’t looking down on Quinn, she’s recognising that Quinn very much is in a self-destructive spiral, just like she used to be, and wants to help her out of it, wants her to have the chance she didn’t, while recognising that Quinn is a danger to herself and to Beth at the current time. The notable thing to spot over 3A is that Shelby sees right through Quinn in a way few characters do, and is always genuinely trying to help her.

Which takes us to step three: what should she do about Quinn and Puck? She tries to set boundaries, and they get ignored. She wants to do it more slowly, to avoid what happened with Rachel, and Puck shows up uninvited, and Quinn keeps pushing - Shelby is bad at saying no, and clearly concedes more than she’s willing to or ought to. Equally, she doesn’t want to immediately ask a couple of teenagers with their own issues to babysit. 

Could Shelby handle it better? Probably, but there isn’t really any good way to act in this situation, and certainly no good way for someone with Shelby’s history to act. 

S3E6, Mash-Off: “It’s not about whose body she came out of. [Motherhood is] about accepting the fact that you don’t matter anymore. That your feelings, your life, and your body, they all come second to making sure that the child is happy and safe.”

Which, for the record, is where Quinn was in season one, just as Shelby herself was learning that lesson. It’s not about genes, it’s about care, and putting someone above your own wants. Shelby wanted a relationship with Rachel - and recognised that what she wanted wasn’t a healthy thing for Rachel. Quinn wants Beth - but more to mark it off as a milestone, an achievement. Quinn isn’t remotely ready to be a mother, not in season one, and certainly not in season three. It’s the same as the prom queen episode later in the season. She has an idea of what she wants her life to be, but none of it is actually her, just her idea of what she ought to do, and Shelby recognises that. (Quinn explicitly suggests that she could go back to being ‘Little Miss Blonde Perfect’ in S3E2, and Shelby replies with “Were you ever really that?” which, again, something Quinn herself takes the better part of the season to learn. The blonde is as much dye as the pink).

Shelby wanted Quinn to be in Beth’s life, but Quinn wasn’t ready. She just wasn’t. Quinn was having a crisis long before Shelby came back, Shelby just acknowledges it and tries to help her through before she’s a danger to herself or to Beth. Letting Quinn interact with Beth would be irresponsible, cutting Quinn off isn’t something Shelby would be able to do, so we’re left with that awkward middle-ground of Shelby wanting Quinn to clean up her act and Quinn taking it as an acting challenge, not acknowledging that she’s not fooling anyone.

Which brings us to Puck. 

I will not defend Shelby’s actions - they don’t ruin her for me, though I can understand why it would be a step too far for a lot of people. 

But let’s talk why this happened. 

Tonight, We Are Young

S3E8: Hold Onto Sixteen: “It goes away, you know... the young. It happens really slow, and you don’t even notice it, and then one day everything just feels different. 

Don’t wish away your life. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. I think I thought being with an eighteen year old would make me feel eighteen again, but mostly it made me feel even older. 

Alright. I’m going to enjoy my last few hours of being a teacher. I recommend that you enjoy being up on that stage.” 

This is where that whole ramble about season two comes in. This is what Glee is about. Season one regularly paralleled the lives of the teachers with the drama of the students, both with Quinn and Shelby even back then, and of course Will’s whole story is about recapturing elements of his youth. Later seasons show the same characters navigating adult life, how their usual shenanigans aren’t so effective in the real world, and it parallels relationship drama in New York with the students still at McKinley... 

Glee is about growing up, the good and the bad. I think, if you watch this show as a teenager, you won’t quite get that. I don’t think there’s any way you can. Glee definitely suffers from being unsure of its target audience at points, I feel. 

But let’s talk about Shelby Corcoran. She was pregnant in her twenties and wanted to be a mother, and it’s fifteen years later and she only just got a baby. That’s a third of her life gone. She’s single, with a string of short-term flings mentioned but no indication of any long-term relationships nor any expectation of one. And she wants to be young again. 

Haven’t we all felt like that? Especially after recent years, to be honest. What if we could go back five years, ten years, and do something differently? Grab an opportunity we weren’t able to grab? Everyone’s given these arbitrary milestones to meet - get married, have kids - and there’s always that vague pressure if you feel you’re not moving ‘fast enough.’

We could talk about Shelby. We could talk about Quinn trying to hit certain milestones over her high school life and failing pretty much all of them, we could talk Will not knowing how to date as an adult after staying with one person since high school, we could talk about Beiste and Emma who are full-grown adults that didn’t hit romantic of sexual milestones that most people would expect, we could talk every queer kid who takes a few more years to come to terms with what they want and inevitably lag a little behind. We could talk about the fact all these milestones are bullshit as is, but that feeling of pressure never goes away. 

Shelby hit a milestone she planned to hit fifteen years ago. She feels the inexorable pressure of time, and tries to recapture her youth. And yes, does something wrong, something that ought to see her fired - though the fact the Troubletones are shut down in the aftermath and she leaves for New York indicates she did remove herself from the situation. Still, for me, what matters is not what the writers had her do, it’s why she did it. As gross as the plot point itself is, the purpose behind it lends sufficient weight for me to be more than just uncomfortable. 

In Conclusion

I think there are some details here that are open to interpretation. I’ve seen Shelby called manipulative - I’d disagree with that characterisation, but no doubt you could find angles to take to lead you to it. One could debate how much of season three is her trying to use her experiences to help Quinn, how much is her projecting upon Quinn in a situation that doesn’t always fit, and how much is trying to live vicariously through Quinn. While I take a more sympathetic view, I could see the argument for some of these others. 

You’re not going to find me claiming that Shelby’s perfect. I don’t think she is, nor would I want her to be. I think her flaws are compelling, and her motives make her an interesting character to dig into - and, yes, I find her relatable and sympathetic at many points through her appearances. 

(Also, yes, I cried at I Dreamed A Dream)

And while there are definitely things I think you could argue make her unforgivable or unlikable - things basically every character on Glee has - there’s also enough there to engage with if you want to. 

So, yes, I like Shelby Corcoran. I find her arcs compelling, her relationships in general interesting, her character marvellously complex, and the parallels she has with the rest of the cast add a lot to the themes of the show. 

Thank you for reading this far about a character no one else seems to care about. If you did.