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TV series of the 21st century: Glee

Post 1

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

[I stopped regular TV viewing in 1999, so I've missed a lot of recent series. Popular culture throws off a lot of references to TV shows, though, so I've been meaning to retrospectively catch up on the highlights of what I've been missing. DVDs are handy for this. My local library has, or can get, most of the leading TV series, one season at a time. I've just looked at the TV series that H2G2 has edited guide entries for, and hardly any of them started after 2000. So, you might want to think of this journal as the kernel for a future guide entry, wit one caveat: I have so much ground to cover that I can't even see more than five or six episodes of the *first* season of any of them -- library DVDs have to be returned within a week, and there are numerous other series to sample -- so mastering any one series would take much longer than a month or two. But if any other researchers wanted to pool their resources with me, I'd be happy to collaborate.]

"Glee" Started in 2009. Most of the actors who were in the first season are still on the show six seasons later. This matters little for the characters who are on the teaching staff, but it's a little more serious for the teenage students. Lea Michele, who plays Rachel, is now 28, about a decade too old to still be in high school. Cory Monteith [Finn Hudson] escaped aging in a tragic way: he died a couple seasons back. Of course, people who enjoy a show will readily suspend their disbelief if the actors are talented enough to bother caring about. I think that, overall, these actors are worth the bother.

The situation is constructed using a mix of credible and questionable assumptions. The most credible is the idea that, in this particular high school, the staff involved with different programs are in heated competition with each other for resources. This gives Sue Sylvester's [Jane Lynch] cheerleader maven a chance to be always trying to force the glee club out of business so the money it requires would go to the cheerleaders instead. Sue is always gleefully driving home for her cheerleaders the message that there's no gain without pain, and lots of it ["You think you have it hard? I have hepatitis" she says in an early episode].

Will Shuester [Matthew Morrison] is just as determined to make the glee club survive and prosper. Granted, the deck is stacked against him -- one of his singers is in a wheel chair, some of the talented singers are on the football team and face derision when they try to keep up with Glee, and there's a gay singer [Kurt Bummel, played by Chris Colfer] who gets more or less constant derision at school as well as at home.

So, there's plenty of internal friction to drive storylines. Unfortunately, the scriptwriters go a bit too far with it by insisting that Principal Figgins [amusingly played by Iqbal Theba] has to disband the glee club if it fails to win the regional championship within its first season.

Now, think a minute: how many high school football teams would survive their first season if they had to win the regional championship? Not many, I'd guess. The same goes for pretty much any other student activity. The key element here is local funding. The people who run the regional championships don't pay for local activities, so why would a local school board pay any attention to them? What does a regional trophy do to bring more money into the school's coffers? Nothing. Therefore, I think that element is too overstated to be credible.

On the other hand, it's not a bad storytelling device. It adds a huge bit of motivation for the singers to strive against. If the cheerleaders have to struggle against their martinet of a leader, then there's justice if the singers have a hard row to hoe too. Plus, there's a lot of excitement in competitions. The viewer might wonder at the high standard of rehearsal scenes, but competition scenes are credible -- the singers are giving their best, and presumably have been well-rehearsed.


TV series of the 21st century: Glee

Post 2

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

["Shuester" should be "Schuester"]


TV series of the 21st century: Glee

Post 3

Icy North

It's a great idea to write entries about TV shows, paulh.

In my opinion, to make them readable, you have to elevate them beyond all the factual stuff like episodes and actors. That's for Wikipedia to do. On h2g2, you want to be giving people the knowledge and wisdom in order for them to decide for themselves whether or not they want to watch it. The best entries are critical, fanatic, or a little bit of both.


TV series of the 21st century: Glee

Post 4

paulh, vaccinated against the Omigod Variant

Thanks, Icy. When I reread my original post in this thread, I was struck with how much it resembled a review.


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