I watched much of the first half-season of Glee in December...

[alexandraerin]

...when I was snowed in with my family, the week of Christmas. It's taken me a while to figure out what I think about it. I had heard so many good and bad things about it, and the thing is, they're basically all true. I found myself agreeing with both the show's fans and its detractors.

I've finally decided that the detractors have it right. Where it all really crystalizes for me is in a single line of dialogue in the semi-finale, "Sectionals":

"Because sometimes, being special... sucks."

That's not a bad line, objectively, in isolation. It has the makings of a great line. If the circumstances under which it was uttered were difference, if the characters in the scene were different, it could have been great. But these words of wisdom were directed not at the any of the cast's racial minorities, the student with a disablity, the one with a speech impediment, or the gay student but at the straight, white, able-bodied football hero main character.

What is his special quality that sucks so badly to have?

Leadership.

The writers don't seem to have any idea how to depict this quality other than to suggest that the rest of the Glee Club is totally lost without him. When he's there they can pull it together and win, when he's not they fall apart. In the show's universe, his popularity definitely helped the Glee Club but that's not the same thing as leadership. Being popular and athletic and clean-cut (and ah, demographically advantaged) in high school is often equated with "leadership" by middle-of-the-road educators, but it's not the same thing.

Among the criticisms that have been (accurately) leveled at Glee are the following:

1. Among the students who make up what is in theory an ensemble, they consistently put the least likable ones front and center.
2. The rest of the cast consists largely of a series of "tokens" rather than well-developed characters.
3. They abuse the hell out of autotune and other suchlike exciting bits of auditory jiggery-pokery.

And the thing is, these criticisms are all tied together... and they all tie into why that line of dialogue killed Glee for me.

They cast the least experienced singer as the guy they made into a main character, the selfsame football hero. Because he's the main character in a show that revolves around a show choir, they shine every note he sings to a high polish, and as a result you end up hearing a voice that doesn't begin to match the face you're looking at. It would be less jarring if they brought in another person to record the vocals. They overuse digital trickery in general, but it's worst in his case because his voice needs the most work to bring it up to the "quality" demanded by the premise that he's the best.

If they didn't have the idea that the show needs a storyline about an All American Guy (who must be an athlete, not a "choir geek") and an All American Girl running through the season, they wouldn't need to put this guy and everybody tied up in his plotline (basically, the two straight able-bodied WASP kids and the two straight able-bodied Jewish kids) front and center constantly, they wouldn't have to lean on the quite exciting computer magic in such an egregious and transparent (and not particularly ear-pleasing) fashion... and they wouldn't have this ridiculous moment where the guy who is just now for the first time in his high school career having real Problems complains about how many Problems he has and is told, in all seriousness and without a trace of irony, that he has Problems because "being special sucks".

That line is not the most offensive, questionable, or problematic thing in the show... not as a whole or even that episode in particular*. It just sums up so much of what's wrong with the show, in every sense of the word.

---

(*The Mercedes vs. Rachel thing from the same episode was pretty egregious, for example. Do we really need TV shows that actively preach the moral "tokens belong in the background"?)

Comments

[leastlikely.livejournal.com]

I see what you're saying, but I really appreciate the fact that the show makes fun of itself for doing this - it's pretty clear that they're not trying to be remotely realistic. When Sue split up the group and created "Sue's Kids" with all the the tokens in one singing group. They all met up together for a little jam session and as Sue's Kids were leaving, Artie said "bye, white people!" I love that line because Artie is white. He said this to mock the token abuse in the show.

One thing that really bothers me is how Tina and Mike both have the same last name. Tina Cohen-Chang, Mike Chang. Is Chang the only Asian name you could think of? Neither of the actors have particularly "Asian" names (Jenna Ushkowitz and Harry Shum) so why do the characters need "Asian" names, and if they need "Asian" names WHY ARE THEY THE SAME. I mean yes, there were a lot of Asian kids in my high school who had the same last name and weren't related. But I find it just kind of obnoxious that they do it on the show. There are no other Asian characters to speak of so why bother.

Also: how do people feel about the fact that the two teams they had to compete against were made up of minorities?

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I know they wink at the tokenism... but that doesn't change the fact that it's there. I mean, they could have made a show from the point of view of the "misfits" and still done stuff like that.

It is a progressive show, as far as that goes... the fact that it counts as progressive is depressing, but it's not responsible for the whole of society around it.

All this is why I couldn't make my mind up about it, because like I said, I basically agree with its supporters and detractors.

But the oh, it's hard being a quarterback thing wasn't winking and it wasn't tongue-in-cheek and it's basically where they lost me. I don't care about a character because the script says he's special.

[stormcaller3801.livejournal.com]

I was expecting something like that. Not so much that in particular as just a show that I'd dislike. 'Glee club' and the word glee itself always make me think of forced happiness, putting on an insincere, overly-large smile because you have to, even if the truth is that you're sad, or scared, or absolutely loathe the person you're talking to.

Discovering that a show called 'glee club' has a Five Token Band and issues with faking it just... it fits. In my head, it fits.

[mattwolf.livejournal.com]

If you ask me, your line about it killing glee for you had a much better impact.

Here's a thought: Does the line "Because being special sucks" encourage people not to be?

[kartusch.livejournal.com]

I was having the same troubles with Glee. It feels like its trying to be joking with the Tokenism but just ends up wrong and offensive under a glossy cover.

I do not care for soap opera stuff in general so not sure why started watching it. I do know I stopped because of the Asian girl with the non-speech impediment. She dropped that statement and got snubbed by the guy for not having a true disability and the show just dropped it. It just really upset me that they never addressed that again, nor mentioned at all that being so afraid of social interaction that you fake a stutter to avoid it is in itself a major psychological disability. In other words it hit me a little too close to a personal sore spot. ( I suffered from selective mutism due to sever social phobia)

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that was so disappointing for me, too, for related reasons. There are so many different ways that they could have handled it.

I have a speech impediment...I have difficulty forming certain consonant sounds. S and th, l and y, they come out kind of blended if I'm not careful. I had like seven years of speech therapy, from kindergarten all the way through elementary school... I can speak without thinking about it the vast majority of the time. If I'm nervous? If I'm scared? If I'm overstressed? I start stumbling over those sounds again.

"I have severe social anxiety but Glee helps!" or "Knowing that I'm accepted makes me worry about it less, and that makes me stutter less!" would both have been ways they could have handled the same basic concept. Neither approach probably would have been handled perfectly, but this is the thing about being a "progressive" show: progress is progress.

[kartusch.livejournal.com]

Yes exactly, even addressed badly it would have been something. Instead it was just nothing. And from a show that was addressing all this other stuff it was oddly disappointing. It just irked me so much. Speech issues and anxiety issues could really use some progress in pop culture too.

I have the same S and th problem and W for R, I got speech from 3 until well into high school. At my most focused speaking I sound "foreign-ish", if I am just speaking at normal rate I mess them up. Grown adults to this day think its perfectly fine to say things like "wascaly Wabbit" to me.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

That's really what I was getting at in the post about not being able to make up my mind: I kept being disappointed. And to a degree, the progressive elements gave me hopes that wouldn't have been there to begin with in another show. That's why I stuck with it past the disability fail and the tokenism and the disappointing revelation about the stutter.

The line of dialogue I referenced in the post was the proverbial last straw because it kind of summed up how the creators seem to view the cast. It was like a cherry on top of it all.

[tzadkiel.livejournal.com]

Huh. Hadn't looked at it that way - it has been ... itching? in the back of my mind, but as it was fluff entertainment, I hadn't dedicated any thought to just why. You nailed it.

Many thanks for again expanding my perspective.

[alexandraerin.livejournal.com]

I might not have thought of it in such depth except I'd read a lot of critical commentary on it, positive and negative, before ever seeing the show. It made it impossible not to think about it as I was watching.

Even then, these conclusions spent a lot of time percolating in my brain.

It is fluff entertainment, and it is entertaining... I don't blame anybody who finds it entertaining enough to keep watching. But I know that things like that line will keep nagging at me if I keep watching it.