How ‘Glee’ Works
Earlier on Twitter, I went on a bit of a critical tear about Glee. Not critical in the sense of negative, but in the sense of needing to talk out why and how the show works. What follows is based upon those remarks.
The key to Glee is accepting that almost everyone on the show is a dick. And if they aren’t, they’re stupid. Some of them, in fact, are both. But the trick to Glee is that we nonetheless view these people, the dicks and the stupid, as people who deserve good lives, if they’d just allow them to happen.
When I say the characters on Glee all are dicks and/or stupid, it’s not meant as a slam. The point is that we all are, and more so than we think, but can choose to be less so. We just, more than we’d care to admit, don’t make that choice.
A lot of television comedy seemingly tries emulate the way people think they are, but in actuality aren’t (e.g. Friends). Glee doesn’t allow us the courtesy of that lie. The entire reason Glee works is because it admits we’re dicks, admits we’re stupid, but doesn’t dismiss or abandon us for it.
Glee, at one and the same time, is both a more nuanced and a more blunt variant of Aristotle, choosing not to represent us as worse than we are in actual life but instead only as worse than we think we are. We are all as the characters of Glee are, and some innate understanding of this is what lends the show its bizarre power.
To wit: Glee’s admission that we frequently are worse people than we want to admit — an admission it not only makes but embraces — is the reason why its transcendent moments, and its earnest feeling, fly.
Nominate Unofficial M.E.
In the absence of an official presence (and since the end of a fan campaign I spearheaded called Watch DOLLHOUSE Week way back in May), I’ve been operating what could best be described as Not The Official Twitter of Mutant Enemy.
On a lark, I’ve been urging people to nominate @UnofficialME for Best Brand Use of Twitter in Mashable’s 2009 Open Web Awards. It’s a long shot — a ridiculously long shot, in fact — but I thought it would be interesting to see how far we could push an unofficial account promoting a given brand that doesn’t have an official one.
As of this post, there are just over one and a half hours left to submit nominations for this year’s awards, as the process closes at midnight Pacific tonight, Sunday. So, if you haven’t yet today, please nominate @UnofficialME for Best Brand Use of Twitter in Mashable’s 2009 Open Web Awards.
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