Love it, hate it, dismiss it, you can’t deny thatGlee‘s made a splash.Conservatives love to hate it, a clear signal thatthey fear its power; at the same time, hipsters argue that the show is acelebration of mediocrity, retreading the lamest recesses of American popular entertainment.
Content-wise, two seasons in, it’s still a little tough to sort out the truly inspired bits from the merely good (a lot), the mediocre (also a lot), and the marketing onslaught (a shitload). The show’s a pastiche of all pop culture that has come before it: it eats and replicates the same stuff it’s transforming, so evaluation of it on that front tends to get mired in overlapping contextual webs. Personally, I don’t thinkGlee was ever intended to be overly substantial, and that’s okay. It’s meant to be a trifle best enjoyed on the run.
Theway that Glee delivers, as opposed to thewhat, is always going to be front and center. That’s not to say it doesn’t have a message, though. It does, and it’s basically the same one over and over, which is that it’s not just okay to be different, it’s absolutely vital. Our differences are what makes life worth living.
And that’s a very important thing to keep saying, as noted in thisgreat post byAfterEllen regular Heather Hogan:
And then it got better. It wasn’t easy because the getting better meant I had to dig into my desires and dreams, that I had to to unearth every fear, plucking each one out of decades of detritus and debris. And I had to polish those differences. And I had to treasure those differences. And I had to display those differences for the entire world to see.
But you know what I had to have first? I had to have the language to describe what was going on inside me. I had to have the words and the images to understand what it even meant to be a lesbian. And you know where I found that language? Books and movies and television.
