Life in My Years

My first real blog post back from my month-long silence shall be one about Truth, Art, and Justice.

And it is this:

Only on Planet OverratedTVShowsWithBadWriting should Glee have won its golden globe for Best Television Series in Comedy or Musical.  Now I don’t watch a lot of T.V., but the last time I can remember a show being so popular with so little merit (just to throw in a slightly irrelevant, yet totally petty sidenote here) was Friends. Remember those days? When people still cared about whether Ross and Rachel were really, truly going to end up together — and guess what? After 1 neglected baby, 50 gallons of hair gel, 500 petty break-ups, and 1,545,098 bad jokes, (spoiler alert) they do. Surprise!

But ultimately, Friends was mostly mediocre, while Glee fluctuates between being mostly terrible (I mean, really — just terrible), occasionally bearable, and twice (2; two) sweet. So Glee would still win.

I realize I am talking about the golden globes in a somewhat serious manner and yes, it is a little embarrassing.  These types of awards shows are, by its very glitzy and self-inflated nature, pretty silly, and this is without even mentioning that what merit they do have for existing — to recognize and award excellence in some form of performance art — is tarnished by the often political decisions that ignore worthy winners for lesser hacks.

So why then, am I writing about the golden globes like they matter?

Two reasons – one: because Glee on Fox channel 2 is an overrated and bad enough show that I feel as though I must somehow balance the universe for it having publicly won a coveted and somewhat-respected award for excellence slash superiority in its nominated category of Best Television Series in Comedy or Musical; and more importantly, two: because some people will (wrongly) assume a golden globe win actually means that Glee is a better, funnier show than the other shows that were nominated in that same category. And then what might these misguided people do? They might decide to watch Glee instead of those other shows and before you know it, viewers who could’ve been supporting funny, well-written shows are now watching Matthew Morrison sing and dance Sisqo’s thong song while Tina Fey and Steve Carrell file for unemployment.

Did this potential consequence on the world of television entertainment just send the shivers down your spine as it did mine?

Disturbing? Most definitely. But it’s not just that, my friends. It’s more than just that. It’s unjust. There were simply too many good, or just simply better, shows that were competing with Glee for Best Comedy or Musical Television series for Glee’s win to be anything but unjust. Or at least retarded.

Now here, I must make a confession — I’ve actually only watched three out of the five nominated television series that were in the same category. I’ve never seen a single episode of Entourage or Modern Family.

But I have watched almost all the episodes of The Office and 30 Rock. And they’re funny shows.They’re not mind-blowing awesome, but they’re good. And some episodes are very good. The Office oscillates in quality and funniness, but this season was more solid than usual with most of the episodes being pretty funny and a few being very funny. Jim and Pam’s wedding finally happened this season, and while part one was nothing special, part two was funny, sweet, and warm. It felt like a satisfying and appropriate end to the long, romantically-teasing courtship of Jim and Pam — and that’s not an easy writing feat, considering the patient, sloth-like build-up that started all the way back from season one. There was also the “Scott’s Tots” episode, which was by far the best-written and funniest things I’ve seen on T.V. in a long time, and certainly on The Office.

And 30 Rock is just as good a show as The Office, if not better. Unlike The Office, 30 Rock is consistently good and almost always funny. The plots are unpredictable and odd with just the right amount of random. The dialogue is clever and sharp. It’s a show that grows on you the more you watch, and that’s very rare — for me anyway.

As for the acting, both the cast for The Office and 30 Rock are talented, especially for 30 Rock. And not only is the acting good, the characters are good. They’re entertaining, quirky, yet relatable, and this is probably equally on the strength of the writers as it is the strength of the actors. In any case, the characters, with the exception of only a very few, come off as fresh and organic. All in all, The Office and 30 Rock are both just good, solid comedy shows.

Then there’s Glee.

There are so many things wrong with this show that I don’t even know where to begin. But as the award it won was for Best Comedy or Musical television series, let’s tackle it first from the musical angle.

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First of all, Glee was the only musical out of the 5 shows that were nominated in its same category; so I think it’s sound to say that judging the other shows based on that particular criteria would be a tad unfair. But not only this, the thing is that Glee isn’t even an exceptional musical — in almost any way. The musical bit of the show simply consists of extremely average covers of bubble-gum pop songs coupled with some extremely energetic choreography that I could probably perform if I took a hit of E and didn’t have knee problems. I could even do the singing, because all the voices on the show are auto-tuned or synthesized (or whatever the heck producers do to singers’ voices in the studio) to death. Whenever the cast spontaneously bursts out into tune in the middle class, each note that leaves their empty, smiling faces is deadeningly polished to porcelain perfection; it’s literally as if someone suddenly put on a CD in the middle of a scene, turned the volume of the music way up, turned all the real-life sounds way down, and everyone in the room jumps up and decides to start silently dancing to the CD while moving their lips for some reason. If you strain hard enough during their musical numbers, you can almost hear the dull roar of the recording studio in the background. The only discernible talents that really stand out, in terms of singing, are Lea Michele and Amber Riley (roughly in that order), but they’re both such unlikeable, poorly-written characters it almost doesn’t matter they have pretty voices that we’ll, unfortunately, never get hear in their natural state. Which is a shame, because it would probably sound a lot better than the over-produced and rather boring renditions they’re putting out now.

And let’s not even delve into Mr. Schuester’s song, rap, and dance numbers, which mostly wind up being awkward, strange, and a more than a little creepy as he breaks it down and struts around his under-aged students.

Let’s now approach Glee from the comedic angle. And this is where things get really confusing for me. Because you see, Glee is not funny. This is not a subjective opinion. It’s not a funny show. Jane Lynch is just about the only funny thing in Glee — in fact, Jane Lynch is just about the only really good thing in Glee. And, ironically, the one person who most deserves what little acclaim there is to get from Glee didn’t even win in her nominated category of best female in a comedy television series. But that might be because the writers have managed to mess up their one really good thing by cutting down her role and turning her character all weird about halfway through the season. So what’s left after Jane Lynch? Not all that much. Certainly no one funny.

And no one who can really act either. I have two friends who both pronounce the word “bad” in distinct ways when the occasion calls for it, and so to borrow from them, the actors in Glee are both “baaayud” and “beeayd”. The only exceptions are Jane Lynch and Chris Colfer; they’re both pretty wonderful and deserve a better show. Maybe by themselves. But other than those two shining beacons of light, everyone else is either average to the extreme or terrible. Matthew Morrison: awful. Cory Monteith: bad. Artie, the wheelchair guy: bad. The Asian girl: bad. And most of all, Dianna Agron. She’s beautiful. She really is. Just looking at her, you like her because she’s so pleasing to the eye.

But she is a terrible actress. The only reason I can think of for why they would cast her in an acting role is because she is one of the most naturally (I think it’s natural anyway) beautiful people I’ve seen on television and she looks like the popular cheerleader everyone would want to be liked by. Jayma Mays and Jessalyn Gilsig, Mr. Schuester’s love interest and wife, are actually pretty good, but their characters, especially the wife, are so poorly developed that both these women just simply can’t claw their way up from the pit of bad writing on their own. They just can’t.

Which brings me to another, and perhaps the most pertinent, point of all. Glee is a terribly written show.

Okay, maybe that’s a little unfair. But even if it’s not terrible, it’s certainly not a good show. And it’s definitely not good enough to win a golden globe over 30 Rock or The Office.

There are a few good moments in the show. I can name them: scenes with Jane Lynch from the earlier episodes of the season and the “Preggers” episode. The “Preggers” episode was the best-written episode from Glee, and Kurt’s storyline in that episode was solid. And in the final scene of that episode, when Kurt finally confronts his father, it’s sweet and vulnerable and best yet, it feels true.

And then there’s Jane Lynch, whose bizarre displays of confidence are both ruthless and terrifying, and yet completely hilarious.

But that’s pretty much all the good of it — “Preggers” and Jane Lynch. Other than that, it’s overwhelmingly average and most of the time, just plain bad. Plot, character, dialogue — you name it, it fits that description. The plots are inconsistent, needlessly melodramatic, and aimless. They jump every which way with no clear narrative unity, hence often leaving the audience cold, unmoved, and forgetful of what just happened in the episode 10 minutes after watching it. They’re predictable in all the wrong ways, leaving only tedium as you wait for the story to catch up to what you already knew was going to happen 5 episodes ago. The characters are boringly predictable as well, as most of them are easy stereotypes and caricatures of what you would imagine them to be by simply looking at them. And just as the plots are inconsistent, so are the characters. This may sound like a contradiction between what I just wrote, but it’s not. There’s a crucial difference between a character being inconsistent and a character being unpredictable: an unpredictable character is one that manages to keep the aberrations or surprises of their behavior within the believable realms of their personality; an inconsistent character is one that acts one way one day, and another way another day, and there’s no discernible reason why except that their change in behavior caters to the twist in the plot. Inconsistency is bad writing. It’s the cheap and easy way to appear unpredictable, and Glee is guilty of this many times over.

Now it may sound like I have some raging personal hang-up against Glee and that’s why I keep going on and on about it – but it’s really not like that. I wanted to like the show, I really did. In fact, I kept making excuses for the show episode after episode, so my friend would continue watching it with me. But finally, there was this one episode where it got so bad I couldn’t even pretend anymore that it was anything but a complete train wreck.

Okay, this post has really gone on for way too long. Waaaay too long. I cannot believe that I just wrote a two thousand word post about Glee. I really can’t. And I know after reading this magnum opus on the shortcomings of Glee you’ll find it hard to believe me, but I don’t even feel all that strongly about the show now. I mean, I did when I first heard that they won, but not really anymore. Did anyone even read any of this? I just reread this whole thing and dozed off a little. Sigh.

Just don’t watch the show folks. It baayud.