Comment Of The Day: The Troubling Dichotomy That Is Glee

Today we discussed how Glee creator Ryan Murphy’s tendency to be an insufferable asshat affects our enjoyment of the show. A Small Turnip responds:

Glee is the ultimate pop-cultural hate-fuck for me. It gets so much right, champions the unloved and unlovely, produces some genuinely sublime, can’t-stop-smiling coups de theatre, and is, when all’s said and done, one of the most heart-felt, funny and truly progressive shows on television today. Or ever.

But FUCK ME if it isn’t also skull-poundingly awful, misogynistic, bi-phobic, atrociously plotted, bloated with its own sense of moral superiority and forever teetering on the edge of eye-clawing insanity. It drives me berzerk that I cannot stop watching it, even as I’m throwing things at the television and screaming “What the fuck do you mean ‘I’m relatively sane, for a girl.’?! You’re just fucking with me now, aren’t you Murphy?”

RM and Glee’s Powers-That-Be have so far to go to make the show into a consistent, cohesive whole, but they keep falling back into dropped plots and contemptibly lazy characterisation. I keep waiting and waiting for them to pull it together, even for a single episode, and it never quite happens.

And yet. And yet. I love it. I do. It’s so frustrating to hear Ryan Murphy’s hacky bloviations on his own self-importance, and his overweening sense of creative pomposity. But I still feel intensely, heart-breakingly grateful to him for making moments like this happen. Every time I think I’m out, they just keep pulling me back in. So if you’ll excuse me, I need to go lie down and think about Darren Criss’s dreamy, dreamy eyes for a little while.

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