Our website's name is toooo looooong.
This is the first image that comes up on a Google Image Search for "glee." I think my internet is broken.
Far and away the most anticipated show of the fall is Fox’s Glee, a glossy musical about the misadventures of a rag-tag high school show choir. There is much to overthink here, including:
• the show’s surprisingly radical social agenda, which so far seems to be pro-teen-sex, anti-childbirth, and anti-marriage
• whether they actually hired the production staff from Pushing Daisies, or just ripped off the show’s entire aesthetic
• the astonishingly convincing marriage of soap opera and music video, which makes me wonder why we ever put up with one of them without the other
• is it just me, or do we have some misogyny issues here? Quinn, Sue, and Terri are all entertaining, believable, and well drawn characters (well, Terri maybe a little less so), but why are the forces arranged against the show’s heroes so overwhelmingly female? Even the principal and the coach, who seemed like possible male villains in the pilot, got a lot more sympathetic in the second episode. Puck is still a total wad, though. (Ah, Puck. Good old reliable Puck.) And credit where due, though, the main female protagonists strike me as strong characters, female, in the best sense of those words
• the racial politics, which seem to subscribe to the Scrubs strategy of “Let’s just make the cast kind of flamboyantly multi-racial without trying to hide our agenda, because hey, maybe being diverse for diversity’s sake is an okay agenda to have, but don’t worry Mr. and Mrs. Joe Six-Pack because the most important characters are all still totally white”
• the debt this show owes the High School Musical series, although I’m probably going to have to watch one of those movies before I really tackle that question, and possibly the debt HSM in turn owes to American Idol
• how many episodes it will take before they give the asian girl another line
• and last but not least, the innovative way that the aforementioned anticipation was drummed up.
I will be discussing none of these. Instead, I’m going to focus on the big production number from the second episode.
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