Since it's premiere, Rise has been described as a cross between Friday Night Lights and Glee with its warm, earnest storytelling and abundance of musical talent. But unlike the gleeks from Lima, Ohio, the kids of Stanton Drama aren't nearly as polished — and that's kind of the point.

While Rise does boast some truly gorgeous standout numbers from its young cast — like Gwen's (Amy Forsyth) haunting performance of "The Song of Purple Summer" in Episode 2 — it also charts their progression as the kids rehearse Mr. Mazzu's (Josh Radnor) production of Spring Awakening. So don't expect every note to be pitch-perfect or every step to be graceful. For the talented cast of Rise, many of whom have had years of theater experience, the real trick was pretending to be bad.

"Figuring out how much we should rehearse was one of the more interesting struggles we had in pre-production," Ted Sutherland (Simon) told MTV News ahead of this week's episode. "We didn't want to look like we were over-rehearsed and that we were too good. There would always be talks about how well everything should come across — just how cleanly the dancing should be and the singing."

Instead, the cast rehearsed what Sutherland called "calculated mess-ups." "If we started out in Episode 2 and we already looked like we were ready for opening night, no one would be interested in seeing the progression," he said. "So we had to tone everything back."

But in Episode 3, titled "What Flowers May Bloom," Simon Saunders (Sutherland) gets a moment to shine. At the end of the second episode, Simon's conservative parents tell him that he's transferring to St. Francis, a private Catholic school nearby. It's clear that this decision was made in response to Simon's choice to pursue the role of Hanschen — a confident character with a male love interest — in Stanton High's production of the sexually provocative musical Spring Awakening. As a result, Simon delivers one final swan song ("Left Behind") to his cast and heartbroken best friend Lilette (Auliʻi Cravalho) ahead of his impending departure.

"He doesn't have much of a choice," Sutherland said. "His father dropped the hammer and said, 'This is what you're going to be doing. End of conversation.' And there's nothing that Simon can do to come back from that, so he's going to make the most of his final moments in the theater and really enjoy it for everything that he can."

He's also doing everything he can to avoid Jeremy (Sean Grandillo) — the source of his unrest — as he grapples with these confusing, newfound feelings for his scene partner. "Simon's arc is about finding himself and being true to himself," Sutherland said. "That's a universal issue. Everyone goes through a period of figuring out who they really are and even being afraid to confront who they really are. I know I've gone through that myself, and I'm still going through that."

In fact, the young actor said he learned a lot about himself through Simon. "I've been doing it for a very long time, and you can get kind of down on yourself and you have rough years," he said. "To rediscover the early points of your career when it was all just fun and there was no pressure, when you're back in youth theater performing because you enjoy it and nothing else, that was the best discovery I made through this experience."

For Simon, however, that adolescent journey — his own spring awakening, if you will — is fraught with questions he doesn't know the answer to, or, rather, doesn't want to know the answers to. Yet.