My online buddy Jaquandor wrote an evisceration of the TV show Glee recently:
I hate Glee. Hate it. Absolutely hate it. But I’ll say this: Glee sure is a fun show to hate. It’s total crap.
Virtually everything he says is absolutely, positively true. And (most of) it doesn’t matter to me one whit.
What do I hate about it? Well, the characters, for one. This is one of those shows that makes me constantly say to myself, “Nobody would ever act this way in real life!”
Well, no, but see, I see Glee as a musical. Musical theater, or movie musical, operetta, or even a Bollywood video. “Real life” isn’t the point.
In one episode, the Jane Lynch character played a sex tape or something like that made by the glee-club director over the school’s PA system. I don’t know if that was supposed to be funny, but someone does that in real life, and they’re almost certainly suspended from their job by the end of the day. Ugh.
Well, yes, but the Sue Sylvester character often gets her way, at least in the short run, by her bullying and intimidation.
That said, the schtick IS getting tired. Her character worked for me in Season 1, so the writers ramped it up, with the supervillains’ clique that included Will’s ex-wife?
I also hate how the show’s musical numbers are all the same: a person starts singing while everyone else sits around, staring at them in rapt amazement.
That is true, and that’s the show’s conceit. It’s the same kind of thing one saw in this scene in the movie 500 Days of Summer.
In any case, I’m happy that it isn’t always Finn and Rachel, with an occasional solo by Mercedes, but they’ve opened up to the rest of the cast.
I hate how the show constantly implies that only singers are musicians of any worth — no lip service at all is paid to the incredibly talented instrumentalists who are never seen rehearsing or practicing, and yet who provide perfect — and anonymous — accompaniments each week.
At least they’re on screen. Usually, movie musicians are invisible, some orchestra dubbed in later; the opening street scene in West Side Story immediately comes to mind. I’m happy these instrumentalists get any screen time at all. And given the fact that the school budget is often in peril, it’s amazing how many instrumentalists there can be, when necessary.
I hate the show’s reliance on cliche, from the flamboyant gay character to the way the season finale, set in New York City, opened with glittering shots of Times Square while the opening bars of Rhapsody in Blue played.
To me, the interesting thing about Kurt, the “flamboyant gay character” is that, in some ways, his character is about the most real person on the show, from dealing with school bullying to his father’s struggle with accepting his son’s sexual orientation. Last season, I said that Mike O’Malley deserved an Emmy for his portrayal as Kurt’s dad Burt.
I mentioned that there were a couple of gay college teens speaking at our Adult Education hour at church on June 5. They seemed to feel, and I tend to agree, that, in the main, Kurt’s portrayal by Chris Colfer, who, at 21, is closer to high school age than most of the cast, has been a net positive for other gay and questioning teens.
Ah, nuts. Haven’t seen the last episode this season yet. Good thing I LOVE Gershwin.
Glee is ghastly garbage!
It’s inconsistent, for sure.
(Why do we watch it? The Kid likes it.)
And I watch it, in part, because it is currently the ONLY show the Wife and I watch together. (We’ve recorded 30 Rock, but we haven’t seen an episode all season.) And that counts for something.
Oh, and my wife has several albums from Glee which she plays in the car. So my daughter knows Bust Your Windows and You Can’t Always Get What You Want from the Gleekified versions, not the originals, which I suppose is a problem in the short term.
Still, Glee has to be better than any number of reality shows that, just from their commercials, rot my brain.
Roger, I agree with you on many points. Jane Lynch’s Sue Sylvester is a scream, because she is the stereotypical mean gym teacher who aspires to be much more – the only thing holding the character back is that she isn’t a lesbian, the irony being that Jane Lynch is out and proud. Jane is also the “mentor” for the kids on the set, which the Will actor (their teacher) is apparently the biggest horndog in town. (Why? Don’t ask me. He gets laid more than Clooney!)
On Chris Colfer’s character, having living recently in a small town, I know a great many isolated young men who took comfort in his portrayal. And to set the record “straight” (!), most gay men I know, even as teens, were not swishy “Mary” types. A lot of them were on the football team or played other sports so they wouldn’t get shoved in lockers or otherwise bullied.
The Rachel character is annoying. She’s not that good a singer, sort of a wannabe Streisand or Celine. Enough about her.
The band is shown rocking. Maybe they will start giving them some lines, who knows?
Finally, the young woman who plays Mercedes is another role model for teens who are African-American, dark-skinned (a huge rift in the Black community), and big and proud. Her self-esteem shows. I’m not saying that it’s the healthiest way to be, but at least girls who are struggling on this front have a powerhouse role model. She’s kind of like Aretha in that way – plus, her talent is incredible.
Same for the young man in the wheelchair. He’s a roller and a rocker, and even though they didn’t cast an actual paraplegic actor (they could not hae done that “Safety Dance” number last season if they had, I guess), he’s still “not the only one” for a lot of kids on wheels.
Thanks for your comments, Roger. I am a Gleek and proud of it! Amy
http://sharplittlepencil.wordpress.com/2011/06/23/whos-crying-now/
Ooooh, time to sharpen the knives! Sorry, but I’m not convinced. “It’s a musical” may excuse the reliance on song and musical numbers, but that doesn’t give them free rein to just have anybody do virtually anything, whether it makes any emotional sense or not. I’m not asking for gritty realism like My So-Called Life, but suspension of disbelief will only go so far. In the best musicals, the songs may fall into the realm of “fantasy” (since in real life people don’t just spontaneously spring into song), but it’s still believable because the emotions feel genuine. Not so on Glee, where too often the musical numbers are telegraphed way beforehand (a drinking game could be made of how often characters lead into a song by saying something like “I have to say how I feel in a song!”) and consist of little more than someone singing while everyone else looks on in stunned admiration. Once is OK, but multiple times in every episode? It’s just the same thing, over and over and over again. Lather rinse repeat. West Side Story is a musical that is great because, even though there’s singing and dancing, the emotions and the reactions feel real. There isn’t one person on Glee — not one — who makes me think, “Yeah, a real person might do that if they were in a musical.”
As for Kurt: I might find him “real”, but the show wants to have it both ways with him, which is what makes him so irritating. The show leans a bit toward something real and genuine with him, and then in the next scene, he’s as irritating a stereotype as anything I’ve ever seen.
And yeah, the band is onscreen. So what? So are the chalkboards, the lockers in the hallway, Jane Lynch’s track suit, and lots of stuff. The band is nothing more than a prop, and I stand by my contention that refusing to even pay lip service to the fact that playing an instrument well represents as much musical skill, hard work, and commitment as does singing a pop song favorably represents serious myopia on the part of the show.
There’s a great musical to be made from the real situations of a school music program. Glee isn’t it.