DVR Guide - "Glee"

In case you’ve just escaped from a Cold War era bomb shelter and haven’t been caught up in the madness that is “Glee,” I offer a very brief synopsis of Season 1. It’s about a glee club at an Ohio high school where no one cares about glee club except for the glee club’s sponsor, Will Schuster (). Each week, the group fights against the perils of high school, including bullies, intolerance, a rival glee club, and a teacher who wants them gone (Jane Lynch). Every week they almost fall apart and every week they sing and everything gets better.

This is BY FAR the worst show that I enjoy on a weekly basis. For one thing, it is an insanely depressing program. Once in a while “Glee” throws out a positive, emotional, enlightening episode but the vast majority of them are super negative. Nothing good ever happens except the big musical numbers that seem to unite the school for about 12 minutes. I went to a very tough, difficult high school and even I find “Glee” to be extremely heavy handed and generic. In addition to all of that, the storylines are cliché, boring, and reused. Sure, some funny stuff happens along the way but essentially every episode revolves around a threat to shut the club down if they don’t win the next competition or finds the group on the brink of a breakup. Plot wise, it’s one of the worst written shows on TV, which is odd because the dialogue usually ranges from above average to quite good. The writers just have no idea how to write for story.

Every episode begins with me thinking to myself, “This is the last time I watch this thing” and ends with me thinking, “Man do I like classic rock.” Seriously, I blame my viewing of “Glee” on the power of Journey and the other bands the glee club covers. With that said, Season 2 opened strong with a funny mockumentary-style open and provided the usual musical numbers that seem to work no matter what. Still, however, at some point the downright genius one liners and exciting song choices are going to be swallowed up by the rest of the junk that comes along as part of the package. I can already tell that I’m going to grow tired of at least one of the new characters and many of the others are becoming one-dimensional, so well defined as to become caricatures of themselves. If “Glee” could promise me refined plot points along with my Queen cover songs, then I could get invested with more certainty. As it is, however, I fear I’m always going to be riding the fence until I finally give up for good.

Verdict: Week-to-Week