Glee: Full Series Review

Some uni students get peer pressured into taking drugs or vast amounts of alcohol... I was peer pressured into watching Glee and like any addiction... it grew from there.

When Glee came out in 2009 I was still in my High School Musical phase. High School Musical: 3 had been released the year before and I can't help but think if I had started watching it back then I would have been obsessed.

However, Glee isn't exactly kid friendly (for better and for worse) and by the time I was old enough to understand the jokes, references and innuendos the show was already descending into "uncool" territory. I feel like it's a journey every show like this goes on. If it was insanely popular a few years ago then it must be heralded as the worst thing to ever exist by its fourth season.

I'm ashamed to say I jumped on the "Glee bad" bandwagon without ever watching the show. I decided that it was silly, melodramatic, shallow and that all the song covers were irredeemably bad. I branded all the characters as annoying and the show in its entirety as being incredibly stupid.

After watching all 6 seasons... I don't think I was necessarily wrong but I wasn't right all the time either. Actually I wasn't right the majority of the time.

Glee is an insanely entertaining show with characters I have come to adore, musical sequences I want to re-watch all the time and a feel-good quality I would bottle if I could. This show is infectious. It can be silly, melodramatic and shallow with some horrific covers but all of that is part of Glee's charm. What surprised me the most was how emotionally invested I got. For a show that has characters burst into song at the drop of a hat it sure does pack a sentimental punch and I believe that's why it's remembered so fondly.

Is it flawed? YES. I could write a novel on how frustratingly flawed this show can be but for this review I'll try and keep it to the important stuff. There's a lot to talk about so here we go!

1. The beginnings

Will Schuester, is an incompetent high school Spanish teacher who dreams of re-starting the schools old Show Choir; the same one he attended when he was at school. However, McKinley High is an environment ruled by cliques where people who are different are isolated and bullied and stepping out of line is not tolerated by students and some staff, often resulting in an ice-cold slushie to the face.

Will recruits a rag-tag group of musical loving misfits into the club including a slight, closeted gay boy, a narcissistic spotlight hog, a soulful church singer, a crippled boy who wants to dance and a girl with a stutter. While they all have killer voices they don't have enough people to compete. The tide changes when Will hears the school quarterback football player, Finn, singing in the shower. Knowing he might be the only hope for the Glee club's survival, Will blackmails Finn into joining.

Fighting Will for money and resources (and just because she doesn't like him very much) is the resident cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester. Hands down one of the best TV show adversaries ever written. Sue has become the face of Glee because of her brutal takedowns and devastating one liners. The woman is pure evil and she's honestly the best thing about the show.

As the show continues new members join and leave with only a few of the original members holding out for the duration. The most focus goes to Rachel Berry and Kurt Hummel who the show follows after their graduation as they try to navigate life out of school for the last three seasons.

2. How the show works

Glee sets out its own rules very early on. Singing can happen at any time, all the characters know all the lyrics, all the musicians know how to play it. This is just an established fact of the show's world and musical sequences can be both diegetic (real performances happening in the club or in-front of an audience) or musical style in highly edited sequences which can see a character singing the same song across multiple locations.

Each episode usually focuses on the problems of two or more characters in the club, some of which will extend to season long arcs. Part of the reason why the show works is that it manages to keep to its own rules. Yes, crazy unrealistic stuff happens but it's always within the confines of the shows self imposed rules. Sue Sylvester can push several students into lockers and not get fired, Blaine wakes up in the morning with a whole jar of hair gel on his head. It's not a fantasy show in the traditional sense but definitely depends on the same suspension of disbelief.

I feel like the reason a lot of people don't like this show is because it sometimes struggles to find a tone amongst the real issues it wants to discuss and the Disney Channel esque look and feel.

Like a lot of Ryan Murphy shows this show has a very gossipy feel about it. There are so many dating combinations and needless drama that it can be hard to keep up! Amongst it there are some brilliant storylines about vulnerability and emotions which I actually saw as being very positive. Something that I liked increasingly as the show continued was how the show treated its male characters and had male characters confronting difficult emotions in ways I hadn't seen before. Glee is actually a really good show for young men.

3. Characters

Rachel Berry is Glee's female lead. She's ambitious, annoying and abrasive. I love her.

Don't get me wrong during the first few seasons she riled me but what I realised was how rare a character like Rachel Berry is. All too often in shows like this we are given a female character who is an "outsider" but they are insanely beautiful with seemingly no character flaws to warrant this isolated status. With Rachel she really is an outcast and you can fully understand why she gets bullied and how this encourages her to just come back harder, pushing potential friends further and further away. The show is about her finding relationships and learning that her ambitions don't have to fall to friendships, they can both help each other.

One thing I really liked about the Glee cast is how different they all looked. Apart from the cheerleaders there is variation in body types and skin colour. They are all attractive but at least the casting made an effort to be diverse. I wish the writing would respect these characters more than they did. The first two seasons especially seemed to exist in a strange space where it condemned homophobia, sexism and racism but would constantly make homophobic, sexist and racist jokes itself at the character's expense. It's only in season 3 where this seems to dim but it might be because the minority characters weren't in as many episodes and the episodes they were in rarely touched on the topic. Part of this will be due to the kind of comedy popular at the time (watch anything from the disney channel 2009 and you'll know what I mean). It might also be down to the un-diverse writers room for the first two seasons.

Simply put, if Glee came out today there would be problems but while cringey and ill-informed there doesn't seem to be any malice behind it and it at least attempted to tackle issues like racism in a school environment. As the show progresses so does its representations and it's nice to watch a show evolve and learn from its past mistakes.

4. Burt

Ok so I've dedicated a whole part of this post to my favourite character; Kurt's father Burt (yeah I know the names are stupid).

In my opinion the best storyline of the show is Kurt's.

Insecure, bullied relentlessly for being gay and even having his life threatened, Kurt needs the Glee club more than anyone. He's smaller than the other characters and while he tries to deflect with quick wit and sass he's the most vulnerable in the group. While a story about a bullied gay kid is hardly new, what stood out for me the most was how the show showed Kurts self-imposed isolation. How scared he was that he'd never find anyone. His struggle to connect to others because he knew he was different. The physical bullying is only an element of what made life at school so difficult for him which is something a lot of LGBT people including myself can relate to.

What really made Kurt's story so special was the character of Burt. Burts gradual acceptance of his son, becoming one of the most supportive and important figures in Kurt's life is beautifully played and maturely handled. I've never seen a gay son-parent relationship as healthy as this and frankly it's the most important relationship of the show. The moment that sticks out the most between these two is when Burt sits Kurt down to have the "sex talk" and talks so honestly and calmly about it despite Kurt's reluctance. His own comfort is second to his son's safety. The advice is good advice for anyone of any sexual orientation.

In general the LGBT+ representation in the show is very good. Santana and Brittany get a lot less attention than their male counterparts but I thought their relationship was well handled in the later seasons when they didn't sexualise them as cheerleaders as much.

There's also some groundbreaking Transgender representation in the show which deserves mentioning. While Unique at first was presented more as a drag persona her eventual coming out as a woman seemed very respectful to the character, a few awkward jokes aside that is.

Unlike a lot of shows that focus on theatre kids, Glee isn't based in New York. Its Ohio setting greatly worked to the shows advantage allowing the writers to tackle the kind of discrimination a lot of these kids would realistically face. Knowing that for these kids, Broadway is a lot further away than most, endeared me to them a lot quicker. In later seasons a lot of the characters do move to New York but they are faced by challenges there as well. Some of my favourite episodes are when the characters have to figure out adult life in a new city, probably because it's what I'm going through now!

5. The Music

I had to use this screenshot because I love how fed up the guy in the blue hoodie is.

The singing in Glee is actually not as bad as I always assumed. In season one they smother a lot of the vocals in autotune but you can tell that the cast are genuinely talented. My favourite performances are always the broadway ones where they use less interference.

Chris Colfer, Lea Michele, Jonathan Groff and Darren Criss have all done time on broadway and part of my enjoyment is just seeing very talented people being talented!

I must admit there's never been a performance where I've gone "yeah that's better than the original" but there have been plenty of performances where the song has started and I've gone "yes they're doing this!"

There's usually at least three songs to an episode sometimes based around a particular performance or theme. Some of my favourites include the two episodes dedicated to Britney Spears (honestly it's a lot better than it sounds) the Billy Joel episode and the Beatles episodes. The best way I can describe it is it's like a good cover band playing songs you like in a pub. You're not going to rush out and buy their version but you're going to enjoy it while you're there. Darren Criss gets a lot of the best songs as fan-favourite Blaine but there's plenty of good stuff to go around.

6. Season 6

Season 6 is honestly a bit of a mess.

After five complete seasons with a perfectly satisfying conclusion, a 13 ep mini season 6 is tagged on which, while perfectly fine for the most part, goes on to break all its self imposed rules and does the thing every show does when they run out of ideas, break couples up only to get them back together again. As silly as the show could get at times it always seemed to have some dignity about it. It was written out of a love of the music and the fun of it and the characters. Season 6 is pretty much devoid of this which is a shame because if you're going to go out... go out in style!

It's not a complete disaster with some good farewell episodes but the bulk of it really did seem like a waste of time. You can finish at season 5 and be perfectly happy!

7. Conclusion

Glee is either your thing or it isn't. If you don't do cheesy, if you don't do over the top or enjoy pop music or random acts of hilarity... this probably isn't the show for you.

If it is your thing then it can be very easy to get wrapped up in it.

I can't say I enjoyed every minute of it because there were plenty of times I nearly threw my laptop at the wall. The way Santana and Brittany's relationship is handled a lot of the time annoyed me and how the straight characters got to kiss every 5 seconds but the gay characters had to wait for special moments. (I'm not saying I need more gay kissing in the show... I just need less straight liplocking please!) although this did get better around season 4-5. The way the camera would sexualise the cheerleaders constantly got on my nerves as well as the stereotyping.

Glee is a kind of show we might never get again but for a show just over ten years old it sure has aged badly in some parts. Still, there are some episodes I'd definitely recommend and for all its faults I did find myself really enjoying a lot of it. It's a show that screams of the time it was made but that doesn't mean it can't still be a lot of fun.

Worth a watch but remember to stop before season 6!

7/10