Up until last year, I would have considered Glee my favorite how. This makes my 64th post about the show since the pilot and it is the only scripted show that I have a side label for on the blog. I lost my love for Glee midway through last season and the last 9 episodes sit unwatched, soon to be deleted, on my DVR.
Last season it felt like the writers and producers gave a big fuck you to promises it made from the first scene of the first show. In the beginning, Glee was about finding your tribe, outcasts, misfits finding a place to belong and be accepted. It introduced us to characters not seen widely on television. The students at McKinley High were made up of teens who were black, white, Asian, Hispanic, overweight, handicapped, gay and transgendered and a faculty just as diverse and quirky. Viewers connected to these students and watching Glee was like connecting with others like them.
Not anymore. Most of the diversity has been moved to the sidelines. The Asians continue to be underwritten, the wheelchair bound Artie remains generally in the background, the freakishly talented Mercedes shipped away and barely seen. The overweight Lauren rarely seen and the wonderful Coach Beiste only sporadically thrown in.
Last season, Glee abandoned the outcasts and put it's spotlight on the popular crowd. The Glee Club, once a wonderful group of diversity, now looks like a room about to cast for the next Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. Except for the ironically named Unique, the written off Glee cast members have all been replaced by less talented, although hot, but generic looking models. Don't get me wrong, I love me some Blake, Jacob, Chad and Dean (in NYC) but their rise to leads spotlights a blatant dishonesty in what the producers once claimed the core of the show was.
The four graduates the show chose to focus on in NYC were the popular, thin and all but one white. Their popularity brought them more storyline, more airtime and more success. Exactly, what Mr. Schuester told them all the last three season would NOT happen. The loss of Cory Monteith only cements my feelings about the show. Although I will watch the how the show handles his departure, Monteith was one of the characters that remained true to who he was when we first met him. Good looking, but not too good looking, talented but not crazy talented, popular but not without his struggles. The ending of high school was not easy for Finn and out of the four the show gave attention to, his journey was the most interesting to watch. Rachael and Kurt to me are wonderful characters when a part of an ensemble cast, but as leads they often verge on obnoxious. We were told not to stop believing, yet somewhere between seasons 3 and 4, the show certainly did.
