Thirty Things Glee Does Wrong
Dec. 3rd, 2012 12:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
babydracoTo be followed by a Things Glee Does Right post.
Things Glee Does Wrong Include:
1) An almost complete lack of knowledge of, or interest in, how “show choirs” work in reality. Apparently they are not nearly so organized or formal in their rules or the structure of their competitions. There’s no required number of members and there aren’t a ton of solos. There’s no national organization that keeps things under control.
2) A lack of understanding of how actual government funded (“public”) suburban US high schools work. I could do several pages on this, but it includes : tenure, class time, admissions policies, sexual harassment, college applications, grade levels, teacher certification, levels of appropriate interaction between teachers and students, timing of end of year exams , ADA compliance, even how their own school, the one they made up, specifically runs.
3) A lack of understanding of the weather patterns of the American Midwest and how they affect fashion choices and the architecture of public buildings. Schools in the Midwest, Northeast, basically anywhere in North America where snow and below freezing temps are likely to occur always try to avoid as much as possible, forcing the kids to go outside to get to a necessary class. That means there are very few outdoor walkways leading to essential classrooms or offices (buildings located on other parts of the campus and not attached to the main one are usually gyms, music rooms, janitor’s sheds or admin offices students have no need to visit). If there’s an outdoor eating area, it’s generally not in use between mid November and mid April, no one really lingers outside when they don’t have to. The only real exceptions are private schools with campuses that like, spread out across an entire town.
4) A convenient failure to grasp the geography of Ohio. Granted, if you’re not from Ohio, and I’m not, you’d need someone to tell you about the mistakes, but then, it’s not my job to know those things since I’m not the one writing stories set in Ohio. I’m not the one who needed to know that the real Dalton is too far from Lima for a commute, or that Ohio doesn’t have a Six Flags.
5) When Will is feeling out of control and frustrated or scared, he comes home and controls and belittles his wife. Who takes it to a certain degree, because she is mentally ill and the survivor of emotionally abusive, racist parents. Will believes that his marriage to Terri failed not because she was mean to him and faked a pregnancy but because she “didn’t believe in him”. When he discovered the fake pregnancy, he seemed awfully close to hitting her. This would be bad enough, if it weren’t for both Will’s and the show’s, insistence that Finn is like a young Will, and then showing Finn trying to rip Quinn out of her wheelchair because he thinks she’s lying about being able to walk. This happened the week after their Domestic Violence is a Terrible Thing episode.
6) When they cast Artie, they didn’t hire an actor in a wheelchair to play a character in a wheelchair. I’m willing to give them a pass on this for lots of reasons but many people simply aren’t. They’re livid about it. Still.
7) Their attempts to discuss religion are clumsy and hamfisted. They didn’t even seem clear on whether Quinn is a Protestant, an evangelical Protestant, or a Catholic. Like Ned Flanders, Quinn and her family are just a grab bag of random conservative Christian traits. Some of which are contradictory in the real world. Rachel ceases to be Jewish on Christmas- it isn’t just that maybe Chanukah is passed already and one of her dads probably isn’t Jewish so she might celebrate Christmas too (most logical explanation), it doesn’t get mentioned at all. Not even when Finn bought her a pig for charity, she only complains “I’m a vegan”. But the rest of the year, they make a point of reminding us that Rachel is a practicing Jew and there are two holidays that most Jewish people, regardless of their level of observance, at least nod to when they come up…
8) They’ve been making casting decisions lately based on the results of a reality show, and then bending their plots to fit. Ryan Murphy said in the first episode of Season 2 of The Glee Project, that it “isn’t a talent competition”.
9) They think it’s okay to force someone out of the closet. But more worryingly, they think it’s okay to out someone because that person called you “fat”. Even more worryingly, the person who got outed without consent was female, while all the male characters who are gay were allowed to come out at their own pace and in their own way.
10) The character in question comes out to her school against her will, and when she is being harassed by some jocks, her female friends support her by singing Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” (see Inappropriate Song Choices below) a song which is pretty much loathed by the majority of real life lesbians as it appears to be encouraging the idea that lesbian experimentation isn’t something that girls take seriously.
11) All problems experienced by all other characters are treated as less important than the angst of white gay boys. A female character who was coerced into having alcohol fueled sex with the school’s resident womanizer, then gets pregnant, is thrown out of the house by her very religious parents, loses most of her original friends and her place on a school sports team, finds out her dad was cheating on her mother and now they’re getting divorced, delivers her baby during a show choir competition, then gives it up for adoption and discovers later that the boy who got her pregnant is sleeping with the woman who adopted her baby…is told by two separate male characters that she doesn’t have real problems. Repeated instances of bullying experienced by the entire Glee club at various points were instantly ignored the minute the show decided to tackle Gay Bullying. Oh, wait, a brief mention was made of how not nice it is to bully immigrants unfamiliar with classic American public school PE games that no one of these character’s generation has ever played because it was de facto banned from gym classes when I was a teenager. And the incident never comes up again.
12) Will, who had previously been shown as merely a mediocre Spanish teacher, became in “The Spanish Teacher”, so terrible at Spanish that you’d be hard pressed to believe he managed to pass the test to achieve the required certification in the field in the first place. But the show does this a lot, they invent character traits that were previously unknown in order to set up the punchline for a joke or lead into an anvilicious rant. Rachel, who hardly ever wears pants at all, was shown briefly wearing a 1970s style bright blue pants suit just so two other characters could ridicule her fashion choices.
13) Discipline for inappropriate behavior is enforced randomly at McKinley High, although to be fair, that might be one of the few realistic high school moments we get to see. High school was like that.
14) When Leah Michele didn’t want to go on the Glee tour, Ryan Murphy asked her which one of her friends she wanted him to fire first. Dianna Agron approached him with some ideas for her character, so he apparently forced her to play multiple random plotlines over the course of Season 2 that basically made Quinn look mentally unstable. When Mark Salling recorded an album independently, he was suspended from the show and hasn’t had a real plot since.
15) In fact, Ryan Murphy can be kind of a massive jerk. He’s mercurial and demanding, the kind of showrunner who yells at people for not being what he wants them to be, which is people who aren’t intimidated by what he wants them to be. If you stand up to him, he might respect you for it and back down, but then again, he might just fire you.
16) They have such a big cast now that they’re having trouble balancing it out. Some cast members haven’t had a significant plot, or even a real song or more than one line, in weeks. The writers just drop plotlines and characters in favor of other random shininess. It’s hard to figure out why they kept Mark Salling on as long as they did, when they don’t seem to know what to do with him. Tina (Jenna Ushkowitz) is now ignored almost constantly.
17) They occasionally have Inappropriate Song Choices. Like the “I Kissed a Girl” incident mentioned above, they have had two devoutly Christian teens sing a duet about adultery, and had the club serenade a soup kitchen full of homeless people with “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, a song written to guilt trip wealthy people into giving money to African famine victims. While a woman can play Frank in “Rocky Horror”, Mercedes did not have the sexual confidence to pull it off. After he’s disappointed by the religious beliefs he’s had for only a week (that are based on worshipping a sandwich) Finn sings “Losing My Religion”. It might have been moving if anyone had been taking his new beliefs seriously in the first place, but the song is not about literally losing your religious faith. It’s based on a Georgia expression that refers to losing control of your emotions. Example: “Sorry for losing my religion there, but I have a real road rage problem”. Gotye’s “Somebody I Used to Know”is sung by two brothers. “Poker Face”, a song about the difficulties of bisexuality, is performed by a mother and daughter.
18) The writers seem obsessed at times with the idea that Finn has a lot of talent but not enough belief in himself, when most people watching see it as Finn has been puffed up way too much by his white, straight, male, jock privileged Big Fish in a Small Pond life to the point where he is being led to believe he has a lot more talent than he ever really did.
19) If the club is so strapped for cash, where are they getting the matching costumes they seem to procure for every single performance, regardless of whether they’re even going to have an audience? Yeah, some of those are fantasy spots, but many others clearly aren’t. They staged an entire production of Rocky Horror with full costumes, full makeup and most of a set despite not actually being allowed to sell tickets to it or perform it in public.
20) The school should have already owned a handicapped van that the club would be allowed to use possibly free of charge. They shouldn’t have had to raise the money to buy their own. What kind of high school doesn’t already own a van with a wheelchair lift? Oh, on a show written by people who were graduated high school before the ADA passed.
21) Britney never faces consequences for anything she does or says. I suppose this is meant to be funny, in that she’s a character who is so utterly shallow and brainless that she also comes off as totally harmless, leading her ability to get away with truly nasty or selfish actions to come off as kind of hilarious. But I’m including it because it does seem to bother a lot of fans. One comment I saw stated that Britney faces no consequences because she’s not being written as an actual real person.
22) Taking what were previously subtle and amusing background jokes and turning them into Important Stuff, consequently ruining the joke.
23) Quinn’s rapid cycling between sane and sweet, and unstable, manipulative and megalomaniacal. Sometimes survivors of spiritual abuse are unstable, and considering what she’s been through, it’s not surprising she’s wobbly, but the show doesn’t really seriously deal with it.
24) Finn tried to yank Quinn out of her wheelchair because he thought she was lying about being able to walk. But two seasons ago, he, a person with two healthy legs, pretended to be crippled in order to get a job. Quinn could only take a few short steps and stand holding onto something, it’s not as if she was secretly doing gymnastics.
25) The first season was a wicked black comedy that was equally focused on loser students and their teachers who were as, if not more, loserlike. And that was funny, because most adults watching probably understood both perspectives. High school is bad for a lot of people, and it’s fairly common to feel, as an adult, as if you’re stuck in a dead end job, never having fulfilled your dreams (and all you have is your sad little sack lunch and your sad coworkers). But then someone, I don’t know who, decided to jettison all but the most necessary adult plots, and start bludgeoning the audience with social and political messages . Black comedies are good. Message shows *can* be good. But you can’t keep flipping wildly and randomly between the two. Because when you make wicked jokes at the expense of others, you can’t then turn around and preach that it’s wrong to make fun of or exclude those same people. Or rather, you can but it needs to be organic, you can’t just make those decisions based on the tone of the episode or which character the plot is focusing on. If Santana is repeatedly racist, classist, ableist, to her classmates, but you turn around and expect us to be on her side when her teacher is unintentionally portraying her culture incorrectly…
26) Oh, and Naya Rivera doesn’t speak Spanish well and admitted that long before “The Spanish Teacher”, so it was truly unfair for the show’s writers and producers to set her up in a situation where her character had to be fluent.
27) Sometimes it’s like they just want an excuse to perform one of the hot new Top Forty songs, usually it’s a solo for Leah Michele. And it’s like, the song is semi ruined once it’s been awkwardly shoehorned into a Glee episode.
28) Ryan Murphy stated in the second season premiere of The Glee Project, that the Project is not a talent competition, it’s an “inspiration” competition. He’s looking for someone who inspires him to write a character for the show, not a wonderful new talent. He seems to think this is how it works, or at least, he wants the audience to think that they just have to have an awesome personality and they, too, can be a star of movies and tv and Broadway. Which is just setting all those poor little kids up for total humiliation and defeat, because that’s not what acting or being a performer is about. An actor is someone who pretends to be other people, I mean, that’s the fricking definition of an actor. It’s easy to play a character like yourself (especially for child actors), but you get more work the more different kinds of people you can convince an audience you are.
29) The Glee kids, by this point, are no longer the unpopular losers. Four of them were nominated for the Prom court and two won, one is Senior Class President, and everyone seems to love it when they perform for the school. And Rachel is definitely part of the popular crowd now, since the two most popular girls in school cared enough about her to commit election fraud to get her crowned Prom Queen.
30) Ryan Murphy and his writers have been accused of misogyny. Female characters rarely learn lessons without male help. Male friendship is held up as practically sacred, while women seem incapable of maintaining equal, loving friendships. Women randomly exhibit signs of extreme mental illness that baffle their men.
Things Glee Does Wrong Include:
1) An almost complete lack of knowledge of, or interest in, how “show choirs” work in reality. Apparently they are not nearly so organized or formal in their rules or the structure of their competitions. There’s no required number of members and there aren’t a ton of solos. There’s no national organization that keeps things under control.
2) A lack of understanding of how actual government funded (“public”) suburban US high schools work. I could do several pages on this, but it includes : tenure, class time, admissions policies, sexual harassment, college applications, grade levels, teacher certification, levels of appropriate interaction between teachers and students, timing of end of year exams , ADA compliance, even how their own school, the one they made up, specifically runs.
3) A lack of understanding of the weather patterns of the American Midwest and how they affect fashion choices and the architecture of public buildings. Schools in the Midwest, Northeast, basically anywhere in North America where snow and below freezing temps are likely to occur always try to avoid as much as possible, forcing the kids to go outside to get to a necessary class. That means there are very few outdoor walkways leading to essential classrooms or offices (buildings located on other parts of the campus and not attached to the main one are usually gyms, music rooms, janitor’s sheds or admin offices students have no need to visit). If there’s an outdoor eating area, it’s generally not in use between mid November and mid April, no one really lingers outside when they don’t have to. The only real exceptions are private schools with campuses that like, spread out across an entire town.
4) A convenient failure to grasp the geography of Ohio. Granted, if you’re not from Ohio, and I’m not, you’d need someone to tell you about the mistakes, but then, it’s not my job to know those things since I’m not the one writing stories set in Ohio. I’m not the one who needed to know that the real Dalton is too far from Lima for a commute, or that Ohio doesn’t have a Six Flags.
5) When Will is feeling out of control and frustrated or scared, he comes home and controls and belittles his wife. Who takes it to a certain degree, because she is mentally ill and the survivor of emotionally abusive, racist parents. Will believes that his marriage to Terri failed not because she was mean to him and faked a pregnancy but because she “didn’t believe in him”. When he discovered the fake pregnancy, he seemed awfully close to hitting her. This would be bad enough, if it weren’t for both Will’s and the show’s, insistence that Finn is like a young Will, and then showing Finn trying to rip Quinn out of her wheelchair because he thinks she’s lying about being able to walk. This happened the week after their Domestic Violence is a Terrible Thing episode.
6) When they cast Artie, they didn’t hire an actor in a wheelchair to play a character in a wheelchair. I’m willing to give them a pass on this for lots of reasons but many people simply aren’t. They’re livid about it. Still.
7) Their attempts to discuss religion are clumsy and hamfisted. They didn’t even seem clear on whether Quinn is a Protestant, an evangelical Protestant, or a Catholic. Like Ned Flanders, Quinn and her family are just a grab bag of random conservative Christian traits. Some of which are contradictory in the real world. Rachel ceases to be Jewish on Christmas- it isn’t just that maybe Chanukah is passed already and one of her dads probably isn’t Jewish so she might celebrate Christmas too (most logical explanation), it doesn’t get mentioned at all. Not even when Finn bought her a pig for charity, she only complains “I’m a vegan”. But the rest of the year, they make a point of reminding us that Rachel is a practicing Jew and there are two holidays that most Jewish people, regardless of their level of observance, at least nod to when they come up…
8) They’ve been making casting decisions lately based on the results of a reality show, and then bending their plots to fit. Ryan Murphy said in the first episode of Season 2 of The Glee Project, that it “isn’t a talent competition”.
9) They think it’s okay to force someone out of the closet. But more worryingly, they think it’s okay to out someone because that person called you “fat”. Even more worryingly, the person who got outed without consent was female, while all the male characters who are gay were allowed to come out at their own pace and in their own way.
10) The character in question comes out to her school against her will, and when she is being harassed by some jocks, her female friends support her by singing Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl” (see Inappropriate Song Choices below) a song which is pretty much loathed by the majority of real life lesbians as it appears to be encouraging the idea that lesbian experimentation isn’t something that girls take seriously.
11) All problems experienced by all other characters are treated as less important than the angst of white gay boys. A female character who was coerced into having alcohol fueled sex with the school’s resident womanizer, then gets pregnant, is thrown out of the house by her very religious parents, loses most of her original friends and her place on a school sports team, finds out her dad was cheating on her mother and now they’re getting divorced, delivers her baby during a show choir competition, then gives it up for adoption and discovers later that the boy who got her pregnant is sleeping with the woman who adopted her baby…is told by two separate male characters that she doesn’t have real problems. Repeated instances of bullying experienced by the entire Glee club at various points were instantly ignored the minute the show decided to tackle Gay Bullying. Oh, wait, a brief mention was made of how not nice it is to bully immigrants unfamiliar with classic American public school PE games that no one of these character’s generation has ever played because it was de facto banned from gym classes when I was a teenager. And the incident never comes up again.
12) Will, who had previously been shown as merely a mediocre Spanish teacher, became in “The Spanish Teacher”, so terrible at Spanish that you’d be hard pressed to believe he managed to pass the test to achieve the required certification in the field in the first place. But the show does this a lot, they invent character traits that were previously unknown in order to set up the punchline for a joke or lead into an anvilicious rant. Rachel, who hardly ever wears pants at all, was shown briefly wearing a 1970s style bright blue pants suit just so two other characters could ridicule her fashion choices.
13) Discipline for inappropriate behavior is enforced randomly at McKinley High, although to be fair, that might be one of the few realistic high school moments we get to see. High school was like that.
14) When Leah Michele didn’t want to go on the Glee tour, Ryan Murphy asked her which one of her friends she wanted him to fire first. Dianna Agron approached him with some ideas for her character, so he apparently forced her to play multiple random plotlines over the course of Season 2 that basically made Quinn look mentally unstable. When Mark Salling recorded an album independently, he was suspended from the show and hasn’t had a real plot since.
15) In fact, Ryan Murphy can be kind of a massive jerk. He’s mercurial and demanding, the kind of showrunner who yells at people for not being what he wants them to be, which is people who aren’t intimidated by what he wants them to be. If you stand up to him, he might respect you for it and back down, but then again, he might just fire you.
16) They have such a big cast now that they’re having trouble balancing it out. Some cast members haven’t had a significant plot, or even a real song or more than one line, in weeks. The writers just drop plotlines and characters in favor of other random shininess. It’s hard to figure out why they kept Mark Salling on as long as they did, when they don’t seem to know what to do with him. Tina (Jenna Ushkowitz) is now ignored almost constantly.
17) They occasionally have Inappropriate Song Choices. Like the “I Kissed a Girl” incident mentioned above, they have had two devoutly Christian teens sing a duet about adultery, and had the club serenade a soup kitchen full of homeless people with “Do They Know It’s Christmas”, a song written to guilt trip wealthy people into giving money to African famine victims. While a woman can play Frank in “Rocky Horror”, Mercedes did not have the sexual confidence to pull it off. After he’s disappointed by the religious beliefs he’s had for only a week (that are based on worshipping a sandwich) Finn sings “Losing My Religion”. It might have been moving if anyone had been taking his new beliefs seriously in the first place, but the song is not about literally losing your religious faith. It’s based on a Georgia expression that refers to losing control of your emotions. Example: “Sorry for losing my religion there, but I have a real road rage problem”. Gotye’s “Somebody I Used to Know”is sung by two brothers. “Poker Face”, a song about the difficulties of bisexuality, is performed by a mother and daughter.
18) The writers seem obsessed at times with the idea that Finn has a lot of talent but not enough belief in himself, when most people watching see it as Finn has been puffed up way too much by his white, straight, male, jock privileged Big Fish in a Small Pond life to the point where he is being led to believe he has a lot more talent than he ever really did.
19) If the club is so strapped for cash, where are they getting the matching costumes they seem to procure for every single performance, regardless of whether they’re even going to have an audience? Yeah, some of those are fantasy spots, but many others clearly aren’t. They staged an entire production of Rocky Horror with full costumes, full makeup and most of a set despite not actually being allowed to sell tickets to it or perform it in public.
20) The school should have already owned a handicapped van that the club would be allowed to use possibly free of charge. They shouldn’t have had to raise the money to buy their own. What kind of high school doesn’t already own a van with a wheelchair lift? Oh, on a show written by people who were graduated high school before the ADA passed.
21) Britney never faces consequences for anything she does or says. I suppose this is meant to be funny, in that she’s a character who is so utterly shallow and brainless that she also comes off as totally harmless, leading her ability to get away with truly nasty or selfish actions to come off as kind of hilarious. But I’m including it because it does seem to bother a lot of fans. One comment I saw stated that Britney faces no consequences because she’s not being written as an actual real person.
22) Taking what were previously subtle and amusing background jokes and turning them into Important Stuff, consequently ruining the joke.
23) Quinn’s rapid cycling between sane and sweet, and unstable, manipulative and megalomaniacal. Sometimes survivors of spiritual abuse are unstable, and considering what she’s been through, it’s not surprising she’s wobbly, but the show doesn’t really seriously deal with it.
24) Finn tried to yank Quinn out of her wheelchair because he thought she was lying about being able to walk. But two seasons ago, he, a person with two healthy legs, pretended to be crippled in order to get a job. Quinn could only take a few short steps and stand holding onto something, it’s not as if she was secretly doing gymnastics.
25) The first season was a wicked black comedy that was equally focused on loser students and their teachers who were as, if not more, loserlike. And that was funny, because most adults watching probably understood both perspectives. High school is bad for a lot of people, and it’s fairly common to feel, as an adult, as if you’re stuck in a dead end job, never having fulfilled your dreams (and all you have is your sad little sack lunch and your sad coworkers). But then someone, I don’t know who, decided to jettison all but the most necessary adult plots, and start bludgeoning the audience with social and political messages . Black comedies are good. Message shows *can* be good. But you can’t keep flipping wildly and randomly between the two. Because when you make wicked jokes at the expense of others, you can’t then turn around and preach that it’s wrong to make fun of or exclude those same people. Or rather, you can but it needs to be organic, you can’t just make those decisions based on the tone of the episode or which character the plot is focusing on. If Santana is repeatedly racist, classist, ableist, to her classmates, but you turn around and expect us to be on her side when her teacher is unintentionally portraying her culture incorrectly…
26) Oh, and Naya Rivera doesn’t speak Spanish well and admitted that long before “The Spanish Teacher”, so it was truly unfair for the show’s writers and producers to set her up in a situation where her character had to be fluent.
27) Sometimes it’s like they just want an excuse to perform one of the hot new Top Forty songs, usually it’s a solo for Leah Michele. And it’s like, the song is semi ruined once it’s been awkwardly shoehorned into a Glee episode.
28) Ryan Murphy stated in the second season premiere of The Glee Project, that the Project is not a talent competition, it’s an “inspiration” competition. He’s looking for someone who inspires him to write a character for the show, not a wonderful new talent. He seems to think this is how it works, or at least, he wants the audience to think that they just have to have an awesome personality and they, too, can be a star of movies and tv and Broadway. Which is just setting all those poor little kids up for total humiliation and defeat, because that’s not what acting or being a performer is about. An actor is someone who pretends to be other people, I mean, that’s the fricking definition of an actor. It’s easy to play a character like yourself (especially for child actors), but you get more work the more different kinds of people you can convince an audience you are.
29) The Glee kids, by this point, are no longer the unpopular losers. Four of them were nominated for the Prom court and two won, one is Senior Class President, and everyone seems to love it when they perform for the school. And Rachel is definitely part of the popular crowd now, since the two most popular girls in school cared enough about her to commit election fraud to get her crowned Prom Queen.
30) Ryan Murphy and his writers have been accused of misogyny. Female characters rarely learn lessons without male help. Male friendship is held up as practically sacred, while women seem incapable of maintaining equal, loving friendships. Women randomly exhibit signs of extreme mental illness that baffle their men.
