A journey in words...

Welcome to my journey in words! A story about health, exercise, weight loss, food addiction, humor, size discrimination, sarcasm, social commentary and all the rest that’s rattling around inside my head...

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Thursday, August 11, 2011

Glee: Good and Bad


I freely admit that I’m a Gleek, a big fan of the TV show Glee which has been on for two seasons now since 2009.  I’m a big enough addict that I just re-watched the last season finale to get a bit of a happy song and dance fix.  I also confess that I download the music and sing it in my car.

The writers of Glee have a lot of good things going for them, they present a persistent message of hope, courage, friendship and understanding between different people.

They have the balls to include in their permanent cast not one, but two overweight characters who not only get air time – they both have love interests.  They touch on the fact that these characters are overweight, but it’s not the ONLY facet of who they are.  They’re also talented, confident, and dimensional.  They’re fully realized people.

Glee has a gay character whose father is a love letter to what caring and understanding parents should and could be.

They have a character who has Downs Syndrome, played by a young actress who really does have Downs Syndrome.  She’s on the Cheerleading squad.  She is never the butt of jokes.

The writers of Glee love everybody.

Well, almost everybody.

The writers of Glee do not love me.

It’s very difficult to be so inspired, get so much joy, shed happy tears and jam so much over something that’s written by people who despise me.

There is only one time you see cruel, misunderstanding parents and mean spirited, nasty caricatures of people rather than developed characters.  There’s only one group who receives blatant, cruel ridicule on the show – that would be characters who the writers define as “Christians”.

Need examples?  Quinn’s parents, who throw her their daughter out of their home for being pregnant and turn their back on her.  You might be tempted to say hey, there are plenty of parents who do behave that badly.  That’s true.  There are also plenty of parents who, upon learning their child is gay, treat them like absolute crap – but as I mentioned above that particular character’s dad is written like the poster child for good parents everywhere.  Of course he’s a good guy, he’s not religious.

A judge at one of the singing competitions is a Catholic nun.  She’s a nun not because she’s actually, you know, religious or anything – but because she used to be a stripper and she needed somewhere to go.  This is supposed to be hilarious.

Then there’s the “Christian” school choir who competes against our heroes by singing a poorly written song called, “Jesus is my friend” like a bunch of psychotic, frozen-smiled escapees from the Barney Dinosaur show.  If they wanted to put a Christian school choir in there, there are probably a hundred thousand well written, rocking contemporary Christian songs they could have used for them instead of making up something so stiff, frozen and outright bad.  But since the whole purpose was to depict Christian school kids as insane little robots that wouldn’t have been as “funny”.

I’m not even going to get into the Sarah Palin knockoff character, it was nauseating enough that I couldn’t watch that scene all the way through.  Lets face it, I can’t really get through anything all the way through that features Kathy Griffin.

I love Glee, but the people who write Glee make it abundantly clear that they hate me in return.

It makes me a little angry, far more than that – it hurts.


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