Glee

Kelli and I watched the last episode of Glee last night. Or maybe it was the one before that - she's been really busy. I'm really torn about that show. I know from Facebook how much so many of my friends LOVE LOVE LOVE the show. And I myself feel a weird attraction to the characters. But there is a piece of me that can't help feeling that the show is....welll...crap.

The first thing is hard to quantify. It's this feeling that the show can't really decide what it wants to be. This weird uncertainty of tone keeps bugging me. Every week, suddenly all the students and teachers are all obsessed with One Thing. For example, a couple of weeks ago, everybody was interested in "DRINKING" - which hasn't been on the radar in any way whatsoever for two years, and suddenly EVERYBODY is getting drunk, embarrassing themselves, etc. And then they take a nice quick lesson that drinking is something you have to be thoughtful about, and BOOM, next week nobody is drinking anymore. Or being obsessed with Justin Bieber. Or whatever. I guess I wouldn't mind this sudden obsessionism if the show didn't continually insist that it's characters were also real people with real problems that I should take seriously. I can't rationalize these two totally different styles.

And then, are they really losers? They say they are losers, but some of the hottest students in school are in the chorus, and they do these performances again and again that students get really into, with amazing production effects, but still, somehow, they are not cool? At many school in the U.S., show choir is VERY cool, so what is the deal? Hard to manage the consistency here.

The final thing is, well, that the songs, which were pretty marvelous in the first season, are getting repetitive, and well, boring. The medium isn't kind to the theatrical, and you need a really fresh POV to make it work, and they are starting to run out of fresh POV. Though of course, I still get teary at show all the time (though I must admit that a cat food commercial can make me teary).

I will probably be excoriated eviscerated and emasculated for my cynicism. But there it is.