GLEE-FUL DISDAIN

As we’re only two days from the RAPTURE there’s something I have to get off my chest. Seriously…

…okay here goes…

I hate GLEE.

There, I said it… I feel better now. There probably isn’t another more incendiary three-word comment I could make to The Facebook Community. Maybe “Yoga is Retarded” (ohhh, that’s a good one). It’s my own private version of wearing a ‘Jeter Sucks Arod
 t-shirt on a lazy Sunday at the Bronx zoo.

Why? Because I’m supposed to like GLEE. Glee is doing great things, right? It’s getting people to watch a new scripted show. It’s a least periodically funny with its biting jokes and greased-lightnin’ pace. Most of all, it is THE undisputed champion of egalitarian discipline, the bastion of tolerance we need in a world where gays are bullied, fat people are ignored, and cheerleader/jock romances go too often unrequited.

But I hate it. I hate its stupid face and its stupid songs. Here are three reasons, two of them frivolous:

1) CHARACTERS:
The characters on GLEE are some of the weakest-drawn I have ever seen on network television. I look back at the show like FRIENDS and I think, wow those characters were so shallow and predictable, the eccentric Phoebe or simple-minded Joey never breaking stride in ten seasons of stock-scenarios. But if the cast of friends existed in the world of GLEE they would be Supreme fucking Court Justices. GLEE has not one character with an iota of the believability of Matthew Perry’s Chandler, and that is a major problem, because Chandler and the rest never seemed like real people to me. Maybe that’s where I depart from many of my peers, who watch shows like FRIENDS or SEX & THE CITY and are quick to identify, quick to delineate character-types (“I’m a Miranda with a bit of Carrie when I’m drunk on bellinis”). I don’t have that tendancy, although to be honest I’m like mostly a Jack with some Sawyer thrown in for good measure.

2) SONGS:
Dreadful. Not even a little bit good. Some of them are catchy but that’s because the original songs were good. I can play a couple of bars of moonlight sonata, I can even jazz it up with a left hand riff anachronistic to Mozart, but it doesn’t mean I’ve reinvented the wheel. Watch MOULIN ROUGE and you get the idea – oh yeah, I sort of like Elton John’s YOUR SONG. So go buy an Elton John CD. Baz Luhrman at least stylizes his work, the frenetically mashed-up visual style matches the musical schizophrenia. GLEE’s plundering and reorganization is more insidious -- in a show with no style whatsoever, it makes music worse by adding nothing. It’s a creative asymptote, no matter what they do there’s nothing they can add; it’s never the original, and it will never be better.

3) THE NEUTERING, FACILE, MIND-NUMBING POLITICS (AKA the Characters)

Yes, to return to the characters for a second, we don’t just have flat characters, we have characters that I feel actual negate some of the good GLEE purports to do. The not-actually motley crew of Glee club members include the following well warn tropes: the Dumb-but-Dimpled Football Quarterback; the Histrionic Go-getter; the Punky Asian; the Fat Black Girl with Pipes ya’ll; the Lipstick Lesbian; the Dumb Blonde Cheerleader; the Inoffensive-but-Bland cheerleader (also blonde); and, of course, the Gay. This veritable Burger King Kids Club of a crew even has its own Wheels.

The point of every episode and every second of GLEE is that NO MATTER WHAT CLIQUE YOU FALL INTO, YOU’RE WORTHWHILE. That the long-sought great equalizer of high school politicking is here a glee club choir is mostly besides the point, rather that there is SOMETHING that makes everyone valuable and worthwhile, no matter who they are fucking, praying to, or modeling themselves after. Fine, great. But something about GLEE seems to betray its message, for in its cookie-cutter approach to the various archetypes of a middle American high school, we ignore how vastly different people can be, even gay people (some play sports!), even jocks (some are smart!), even cheerleaders (some are brunette!). Having a gay character, even a likeable gay character like Chris Colfer who stands by his friends and sticks up for his principles, isn’t half as brave or philosophically important as having a character who happens to be gay, but whose entire character isn’t defined by this trait. Whose sexuality is, finally, besides the point.

By wearing each characters’ dominate trait on their sleeve, GLEE positions these traits as ‘handicaps’ – handicaps that don’t matter, they argue, but handicaps indeed. We got a Jew, an idiot, and a red-head gay—but that’s okay because we’re ALL IN IT TOGETHER. WE ARE THE LITTLE RASCALS. WE ARE THE OUTCASTS. GLEE is a show for the outcasts, which revels in the fact that there are more of us out there than anyone thinks.

But by asserting its own anthemic qualities, GLEE reminds me of the latest commotion around Lady Gaga – a self-proclaimed messianic juggernaut that we’re supposed to like because they claim to speak for us at last. Casting aside Gaga, or GLEE, is then equated with casting aside parts of yourself: self-hatred, the arch-nemesis of the enlightened soul.

Look, there are worse things on Fox and in the world. Of course its message of love and acceptance is meritorious and I don’t begrudge GLEE for being at least on the right side of the political fence. Creator Ryan Murphy isn’t the devil, and for all his travail to bring the world GLEE’s important message I’m sure he’ll be raptured in a couple of days (oh wait, he’s gay…maybe not). I just hope that, in Heaven or wherever, he makes better TV than GLEE, because its creative and philosophical sins are numerous. And because commanding the National Ear is a hard trick to pull of, once you do, it becomes a responsibility to shout, a capella, a message more all-encompassing than “I’m Okay, You’re Okay.” When the conversation isn’t about acceptance but rather acknowledging the insufficiency of stereotypes, we’ll be a lot closer to where GLEE—in its good-natured attempts—wants us to be.


Oh and it’s so god-damn boring.


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THANKS FOR READING MY BLOG, SEE YOU IN HEAVEN, I’M OUT PEACE