I try not to hate things. Hate is an emotion of blindness, an inability to recognize that things are never black and white, that all things are a mixture of good and bad, that nothing is irredeemable. When it comes to the TV show Glee, however, hate is the only appropriate verb I can find. Detest would do, I suppose, or despise, but this is nit-picking. I hate Glee, plain and simple.
Glee is the glorious exemplar of the Cowelled-down age of musical television we now live in. Everyone is beautiful, or horrific. Everyone has a hidden gift for performing. Everyone can be redeemed by song.
This is absolute bollocks.
The show is produced by Fox, and as with Glenn Beck, they are peddling something disgusting under the pretence that it is praiseworthy. Glee's plots are dreadful, its characters vacuous, and its performances brain-numbing. When the cartoon 'kids' thrust and preen their way through another song, I find I can't actually hear the music. It is rendered so bland by the anodyne arrangements and the characterless voices that each song passes through me unregistered. They might as well play white noise.
In fact, that's what it is. White noise. Clinical caterwauling from Colgatized clowns. Watered-down warblings from winsome WASPs. There is diversity, but only in the way that there is diversity in a pack of M&Ms. No matter what the colour, the flavour is the same.
It is aspirational, too. Aspirational in the way that chopping your own head off to prove your manliness is sensible.
I assumed Glee was a TV musical, which would explain a lot, given how awful most musicals are, but then I discovered it had won awards as a comedy show. How can this possibly be? Glee is utterly mirthless, totally without deliberately scripted humour. The only thing that amused me was that the ensemble's name is Nude Erections.
I am a miserable misanthrope, though. Millions of people like Glee, so it must be good. Just like Microsoft Office, bullfighting and Adolf Hitler.
Glee is the glorious exemplar of the Cowelled-down age of musical television we now live in. Everyone is beautiful, or horrific. Everyone has a hidden gift for performing. Everyone can be redeemed by song.
This is absolute bollocks.
The show is produced by Fox, and as with Glenn Beck, they are peddling something disgusting under the pretence that it is praiseworthy. Glee's plots are dreadful, its characters vacuous, and its performances brain-numbing. When the cartoon 'kids' thrust and preen their way through another song, I find I can't actually hear the music. It is rendered so bland by the anodyne arrangements and the characterless voices that each song passes through me unregistered. They might as well play white noise.
In fact, that's what it is. White noise. Clinical caterwauling from Colgatized clowns. Watered-down warblings from winsome WASPs. There is diversity, but only in the way that there is diversity in a pack of M&Ms. No matter what the colour, the flavour is the same.
It is aspirational, too. Aspirational in the way that chopping your own head off to prove your manliness is sensible.
I assumed Glee was a TV musical, which would explain a lot, given how awful most musicals are, but then I discovered it had won awards as a comedy show. How can this possibly be? Glee is utterly mirthless, totally without deliberately scripted humour. The only thing that amused me was that the ensemble's name is Nude Erections.
I am a miserable misanthrope, though. Millions of people like Glee, so it must be good. Just like Microsoft Office, bullfighting and Adolf Hitler.
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