At second glance, I decided to throw Britannia High, High School Musical and The Biz into the mix, because I'm mad like that and every other review in the world ever won't get away without mentioning at least one of the above, so I at least fit into the safety of the fold here. Luckily, though, the comparisons are wasted, because the only thing shared between Glee and the above three are singing and education, while everything else is thrown into the bins of awful-and-possibly-forgotten children's programming where it belongs.
The show's dialogue is chock-full of the kind of fast-talkin' smooth understandin' characteristic of the higher quality US soap operas (or "comedy-dramas" if you're a bit up yourself) so beloved of E4 afternoon schedulers. This results in everyone, from intellectual and vaguely disaffected teachers to high school drama queens and attendant nerds all talk like they were flicking through the dictionary just before they walked into shot and still manage to get away with it.
For those of us who love to flick through dictionaries before we walk anywhere, this is awesometastic.
As is legally required in programmes of the type mentioned above, the cast consists entirely of variously lovable characters all of whom are quirky in some obvious yet for some reason entirely forgiveable way. There's the quirkily crazy teacher-with-a-crush-on-another-teacher, the quirkily mad drama queen, the quirkily steroidy gym teacher lady and the quirkily whatever everyone else. It's a high school, so you can pretty much fill in the rest of the stereotypes yourself and then just add the epithet 'quirky' in there somewhere, it probably won't matter where. Don't feel bad about it, because that's evidently what Glee's writers have done. Not that there's anything wrong with that; it rather handily saves the programme about sixty minutes' worth of tiresome character introduction, because you already know who everyone is by looking at them. That way, they can get on with a standard loser-bulling based plotline and still fit one in about how being a teacher is apparently an awfully-paid job and any teachers with kids on the way should quit and become accountants in the first hour. Also, the music's awesome! There's Journey, for one, and then a load of a capella stuff over scene transitions and montages.
For those of us who love Journey and a capella hoo-hah, this is equally awesometastic. Somehow, though, the bit where the two are combined manages to suck monkey balls, but you can't have everything.
So, in brief: Glee is good, but then again, so were Ed and the Gilmore Girls, and you never watched them either, you bastards. It's like you don't even care.
So, in brief: Glee is good, but then again, so were Ed and the Gilmore Girls, and you never watched them either, you bastards. It's like you don't even care.
