Cookie 'N' Screen's Guilty Pleasures: Glee

By Cookie 'N' Screen

Glee. Wow, I’ve just heard your collective laptops shut and the deafening boom from the roll of your eyes. I’ll wait for you to re-start. Ok, are you still with me? I’ll start again; Glee. Now wait a minute, before you walk away from me declaring my opinion moot, let me explain myself; I’m a Gleek. That doesn’t really help my cause much but if you give me just a moment of your time and 500 (ish) words I’ll explain exactly why Glee is genius in a really bad way. This is guilty pleasures piece after all and my fiendish eye extends to the television too. I therefore recognise Glee as a brilliantly terrible television show. I’m not condemning, I’m not condoning. I’m embracing. 

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Embracing, hard  

Glee, for those of you who don’t know (yes, you, there in the back), is a musical television series about a ragtag bunch of losers. After taking over the destitute ruins of a once great Glee club, teacher Will Schuester hopes to bring it back to its brilliance. The problem is that Glee is not appealing to students anymore and only the fame hungry thespians will join. It’s up to Will to get the spirits up, get people to join and to help the students through their day to day problems, all through the medium of song. 

Why Is It Bad? 

Pictured: the biggest loser in school.    

Glee can strain the fragile limits of disbelief. Not because the characters burst randomly into song, as that is to be expected when watching a musical television project and I’m not saying that it is unbelievable that all these kids go through so much on a daily basis because this is high school, there are issues suffered by everyone (although, the amount of crap they throw at Kurt Hummel is ridiculous). What I do find insufferable is that these problems are over in a matter of 40 minutes.

Instead of interesting segues into song; 

“This meat is lean….”
“Lean on me, when you’re not strong….” 

It’s that it is forced. Constantly are the teenagers told this; “well, you’re in Glee, sing about it...” And then bam, everything is better again. In separate episode, we have been effectively introduced to; brotherly issues, parent issues, pregnancy, burn outs, homosexuality, dyslexia, domestic abuse, bullying, drugs, alcohol and suicide. While some issues are correctly spanned out over the course of a season, most end by the credits and aren’t touched upon again, all because they sang the latest Top 40 song. Now, I’m all for music being the divine healer but even I know it takes a lot more than Katy Perry to solve your adolescent woes. It’s not like she is Mother Teresa.

Add this to really stiff acting and over the top “we are awesome” that has been saturated series to series. Mix it together with a bunch of hashed musical numbers (don’t get me started on that cover of Hole) and Glee is enough to have you reaching for the remote.

Why Is It Good?

It does help that this show has lesbians. Sexy lesbians.

Most of its bad qualities have only happened after Series One and unfortunately, Glee will never go back to the heights it leaped off from. Series One (and the first few episode of Two and Three) were the epitome of what made Glee amazing and although it occasionally touches on what made it so unique, the rest of the series will just be covers and a “hey, it’s ok to be different” mentality. Glee had a lot of sass and dark humour spliced with songs that actually made sense in the context. It had a balance of being different but still being hated from the inside and the outside. They fit in nowhere because that was what would happen. And ultimately, they lost! Either from lack of practise or lack of belief, they lost. Despite this, they kept trying.

There were brilliant, snappy jokes and an excellent turn from Jane Lynch as witty and sadistic Sue Sylvester. Honestly, there were some outstanding achievements in comedy and musicality including a birth scene that was timed excellently to Bohemian Rhapsody; some of their covers were actually good, it’s hard not to resist. 

I’m assuming this is what most people want to do when it comes to Glee. Except instead of a pool, it’s the Pacific Ocean, and the boat is on fire. 

But that was Series One and Series One is a far distant memory. Now, as Series 4 airs, we are left to believe that you will eventually get your dream placement in your university despite being denied, you will make it in L.A and you will get a work placement in Vogue on your first try. Its realistic elements are now a distant dream as every Glee member is getting sexier and less deformed than before. The only highlight of Series Four was cruel dance instructor Kate Hudson and she has disappeared for a couple of episodes. But Glee had great foundations and its humble beginnings are exactly what keeps bringing me back.

Because that is what Glee is about. Hope. Hope that you can achieve your dreams. Hope that with every song and every issue solved, that Glee will get back to its dark elements.

And they will eventually cover death metal…

Is that too much to ask?

TTFN, 
Cookie