…you’re Glee (aka because you make your brand of quirk a cult).

There was a time when I tried to watch most new pilots that came out, just to have an idea what was on TV. It was unexpectedly fun, for the most part, and it’s why I got into shows like How I Met Your Mother, The Mentalist, or The Big Bang Theory, and it’s also why I was sad when relatively obscure shows like The Unusuals were cancelled. But after a while, my frustrations with recognizably rehashed story line and characters got the best of me, and I stopped. Just ran out of steam.

But then a new show surfaced on the horizon, something called Glee, and everyone raved about how great and different it was going to be, and I felt duty-bound to watch the first episode, in hopes that it would be all it was advertised as.

It wasn’t. Not even close. I found the storylines overly neurotic, more painful, stupid, and overwrought than funny (and I like Christopher Guest movies), and the songs, at best, gimmicky and annoying. Worse, for a show no doubt inspired and emboldened by the success of original musical episodes on shows ranging from Buffy to How I Met your Mother to Scrubs, to even Dr. Horrible, there wasn’t a new song in the bunch. Barely even new arrangements of the classic songs. In other words, it was a derivative, neurotic, and in the end, boring show that traded primarily on unplugged studio dubs of songs other people made famous. Big whoop. In fact, the only things separating glee from the High School Musical TV movies are the slightly more adult drama and the covered aka plagiarized songs (thoroughly bastardized by early 2000s-era a Capella too overproduced to even bear a resemblance to the charmingly annoying campus singing groups that are now ubiquitous).

Cut to act 2, in which everyone, critics included, went down on their knees for this show and haven’t come up for air since. And now, after the dozens upon dozens of ZOMG! status updates, over-eager watercooler discussions, and sickeningly sycophantic review articles I have had to suffer through, I have had a fairly decent time to consider what exactly it is that makes this show not special, and why I hate the fact that everyone who is not a straight male somehow thinks it is.

Glee is catchy because it is impossible to watch without getting some kind of bounce off of its energy, that much I will give it. But dissimilarly from everyone else, instead of finding that energy charming, I find it the opposite: annoying and childish. Instead of providing any sort of actual redeeming or original content, the show trades on an idea that is fundamentally unsound, namely that it can at once be arrogantly convinced of its own cuteness while remaining the neurotic underdog, obsessed with what everyone else is thinking and demanding their attention while shouting from the rooftops that it has no need of it. This is in fact the fundamental flaw in American thinking internationally: you cannot at once be a world leader and an underdog, Heavyweight fighter and towelboy, Goliath and David. Attempting to sell yourself as both is at once disingenuous and irresponsible, because it allows you to ignore your effect whenever you choose – after all, you are the victim here, what could you possibly have done wrong? Therefore: choose your part and play it.

But the show doesn’t stop there – like most depictions of high school before it, it cannot portray its world without sitting in judgment on it. This judgment – as evidenced by the famous L-finger posters – is part of what makes the show so attractive, because it is so petty, shallow, and in your face: we are all losers, is the message, up until the moment the whole football team joins us in song and dance, but the minute the music fades away everything returns to a distance safe enough to allow for wanton stereotyping and, yes, judgment. Glee wants to be both hard to like and yet liked by everyone. As such, it embodies American teen narcissism, a runaway train of self-gratification smeared over a toxic underbelly of self-loathing, stuck in a positive feedback loop deifying the obnoxious within ourselves while steadily and steadfastly removing approachability: the show wants to be pop culture, but only for the chosen few good enough to truly appreciate it.

In other words, as per the title of this post, the show, like many present college graduates who have yet to grow up, has coddled its own sense of superiority based on a quirky tone that has no substance to speak of except for the music of others, to the point of raising it to cult status. Shows that have covered the ground of misfit losers in a hostile world, and done much better, include: Freaks and Geeks, Buffy, My So-Called Life, The Big Bang Theory, and even House. Those shows were – and continue to be – special. Glee? Not so much.

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