Tube Tied

A year ago, right after the start of Glee’s first season, I complained in this space that the show was riddled with stereotypes. These days I haven’t much better to say about the show, other than that, from my perspective the writing has gotten even lazier, which I didn’t think was possible. This week’s Britney Spears episode, for example, didn’t even have a nominal plot, just a disconnected sequence of novocaine-induced hallucinations. Increasingly the show is just an excuse to connect musical interludes, and as people more learned in the field of music have remarked, the interludes are less and less good as time goes on. (I admit I loved the football version of "Single Ladies," but it’s been a long time since the show did anything near that inventive.)

I’m hardly the only person who complains about Glee, of course. It seems to be something of a lightning rod for people’s complaints, particularly about diversity in television. The reason for this is somewhat immediately obvious; Glee presents itself as being a show about misfits. It’s taking up the banner for every kid who hates the social structure of their high school, whose clothes were mocked, who liked the wrong things (like music), or who were just, in the extraordinarily cruel way of teenage thinking, not the right kind of person, because they had a wheelchair, they were pregnant, they were black. For the people for whom any of these things were true, that’s a narrative that’s pretty close to your heart, and when people go to reproduce it in popular culture, to speak for what it felt like to be excluded and rejected—well, you feel a special ownership over that, I think. At least, I still do, though I’m now more than a decade away from that time in my life.