We were all ready to hate Gwyneth Paltrow on “Glee,” practically buttering the floor for her to slip on, but dang if we didn’t end up not only admiring her appearance but also actually starting to like her. The actress we’ve long regarded as the epitome of patrician entitlement, what with her admirable Hollywood lineage, elite New York prep school education and irritatingly early success, not to mention her willowy blondness and blond willowiness,  showed the world that she not only could sing and dance (she already did the “Whoa, she can sing?” thing at the CMA Awards last week, when she performed the title song from her forthcoming movie, “Country Strong”), but also had a serious sense of fun.

Raise your hand if, like the kids of McKinley High, you found yourself — first grudgingly, then increasingly enthusiastically — embracing Paltrow as the wacky substitute teacher Holly Holiday.

We managed to keep a skeptically arched eyebrow in place throughout the Lindsay Lohan-inflected Spanish lesson and the snappy taco-and-toke talk. But once the music started, we were won over.

Paltrow had us at Cee-Lo.

The show cleaned up the words of Cee-Lo Green’s viral masterpiece “Forget You” (the television- and radio-friendly title) but lost none of the joyous flip-off spirit of the thing. And Paltrow moved so spiritedly through the number, mixing it up with the up-on-their-feet glee clubbers that we found her mid-song hair-flip almost charming and forgave her for the way she can shamelessly rock a miniskirt after two children. (Though, really, is that fair?)

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