Why I Don’t (Always) Hate Glee

Firstly, I’d like to apologize for being very MIA for the past two or so months (no, I don’t mean I’ve been eating truffle-flavored French fries). It seems as though with finals and moving out and summer and now job, I just ended up failing miserably with updating this thing.  Devoted blogger I am not! With that said, I thought it would be appropriate to come back from my short hiatus with an entry on Glee. That’s right, Glee. (I may divulge some details from the season finale, you were warned!)

I have some words of warning. Firstly, I (typically) hate contemporary musical theater. Don’t talk to me about Rent, don’t try to tell me how great Spring Awakening is. If Gene Kelly isn’t in the film version that was later filmed in Technicolor, I’m not so sure I really want to see it. If there’s no tap dancing, I don’t know if I can sit through it. And don’t even get me started on the reaction I have to BAD musical theater. The sweat glands from my scalp to my stomach just start to overreact in a last ditch effort to rid my surroundings of the discomfort that is bad acting/singing/ etc…

With that said, my first experience with Glee induced a similar reaction. At the sight of the Glee kids crooning with a group of deaf choir singers, my palms started sweating and I don’t think they stopped until at least four hours had passed. It was so uncomfortable that I swore Glee was a creation of the devil and carried my hatred like a badge of honor for months to come.

And then Hulu-related procrastination began to take over my life. Hours of watching old movies, TV shows, crappy documentaries that I’d never heard of before. I was watching anything I could just so that I could avoid the pounds of work piled on right before finals. So, knowing myself all too well, (and recalling the bodily reaction I’d experienced during my first glimpse of Glee) I decided to use it as a mechanism to force me to do my work. If I procrastinated by watching THAT, then I wouldn’t even want to procrastinate at all! “Hey, Alyssa and Helen!” I would shout from my bedroom. “Guess how much work I have? So much that I’m watching GLEEEEE!” It became the darkest of omens during finals time. A phrase, ironically enough, met with horror: Noooooooo, not GLEE!

But then, to my utmost surprise. I couldn’t stop watching. It became completely counter productive. I was giggling instead of cringing! I was entranced by the musical numbers, the witty dialogue, the cast that (almost) looks like real teenagers. And, if nothing else, the talent. Personally, my favorite is Chris Colfer, who plays Kurt Hummel. (That rendition he did of “Rose’s Turn” from Gypsy? I was almost brought to tears – not sweat.) The show is just filled with people who can actually sing. In a world where some of the most lucrative pop music is created by people who can barely carry a tune – think Britney Spears’ breathy wheez-singing or auto-tune’s infiltration into almost every popular song – it’s nice to be able to sit down for an hour and watch a group of people just straight out belt it.

Not to say that my weekly allotments of Glee have been sweat free. Sure it’s still saturated with sentimentality and offers at least one cringe-inducing scene each episode. Even the season finale had its fair share of awkward moments. What with Quinn, the resident preggers teen, giving birth to her baby as the groups’ arch nemesis choir troop performs “Bohemian Rhapsody.” (As they sing “Mamaaa” she becomes one….dear lord) But the show still manages to, well, be quite watchable. Maybe it’s the casts’ talent. Or maybe it’s the saccharine sentimentality that lies at the heart of the show that makes it so watchable and yet so unwatchable at the same time. The show is simply miles and miles apart other from contemporary teen dramas. The kids on Glee live in Ohio. Not Manhattan or the OC. They live in the “real” world. Their minds aren’t clouded by their bulging wallets. Their parents, when present, actually seem to … well … care. They fall into some of the same pitfalls as characters on other teen dramedies, (teen pregnancy, homosexuality, unrequited love) but with tears and a tune! Glee manages to address the tough stuff with actual feeling.

In his E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction, David Foster Wallace claims that, the “next real literary ‘rebels’” will “…treat old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction.” (Not that I’m promoting Glee as the answer to the problems DFW addresses in his essay…just sayin’.) Instead of relying on “shock, disgust, outrage,” real rebellious fiction in the modern era risks “the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists” and “accusations of sentimentality, melodrama.” Hey, maybe it also risks a few sweaty palms.

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