A Glee Misfortune

One of the things that make me stand out as a person is the need I feel to burst into song at pretty much any moment in time. When I’m happy – I’ll sing. When I’m sad – I’ll sing a sad song. Give or take, show tune or popular song, made up or memorised, I pretty much like to pretend that life is a musical without all the stress of forgetting the words or stage fright.

Then Glee came along and it was like a meeting of a number of my favourite thing: romance, drama, comedy, hot guys, crazy cheerleaders and above it all – life as a musical. Ryan Murphy must have had the same desire to sing about life that I did in high school, but probably without quite so many Disney song lyrics and fantasised Greek muses telling him to admit being in love. For two years I snapped up each episode of the darling television music fest and eagerly awaited more – pondering if Finn and Rachel were going to ever end up together, wishing I could stab Quinn and wanting to hug Kurt more than anyone else in my entire life. I laughed, I cried, I sang – it became like a friend just ready and waiting to take me away from my life for an hour or so every week to a world where none forgot the words and everyone knew the dance routine through telepathic communication.

Then last year happened and hope started to fade.

Let’s face it Glee – Season three was more or less where things should have started to wrap up. But they didn’t.

The attempt to reboot the franchise after the graduation of a number of the main characters from McKinley High by introducing newer, younger characters such as the painfully naive Marley, Puck’s playboy little brother Jake and the transgender (but all round worthy) Unique was a good try. It even worked in refreshing the show for a couple of episodes, but then sort of failed to get any better after that. Instead it sort of started to work in the opposite way by returning to the same high school drama but without the characters that I love. Fortunately throughout last season there was the saving grace of following Kurt, Rachel and Santana to New York to see how their dreams of making it big on Broadway work out for them. With a few bumps in the road, some of them bizarre and irritating like Dean Geyer’s gigolo, but mostly pretty smooth sailing right to centre stage and success. Yeah, like the real world.

I was never under any false misapprehension about the reality of Glee and what it represented, but sometime last year it started to really just stop hitting the mark. I think it was around the time that every song started being top 40 and basically everything else that happened in Season Three. And Season Four is so much worse that I actively want to commit harakiri rather than keep watching it anymore and torturing myself with the stupid crap that’s happening to a bunch of characters that I don’t like (I’m looking at you, Tina).  

And oh my god did they seriously compare ‘twerking’ to Elvis’ pelvic thrust as a groundbreaking dance move of the generation. Now I know that you just want me to hate you, Glee. You’ve betrayed me and the memory of the King of Rock with that statement.

But I suppose the reason why this bothers me so much about the show going to hell is because of how much I loved it in the first place, how it embodied something that I absolutely loved, and then killed it slowly and painfully. I continue to watch long after it started to hurt my soul because every week I have this kernel of hope that it’s going to get better. But joke’s on me because I don’t see that happening when the wonderful Cory Monteith A.K.A Finn passed away earlier in the year and it was his easy going talent and nice guy attitude that made it so worth watching a lot of the time. Obviously his sudden death was horrible for everyone who knew him (especially Lea Michele his on and off screen love), but the sad truth is a Glee world without Finn is hardly worth watching at all. Not even Kurt’s huggable charm is even enough for me anymore.

After all these years, all these hours and all this emotion, I desperately want to quit Glee. There’s no joy in it anymore, and maybe I’ve just out grown the After School Special themed issues that dominate the majority of the episodes’ storylines, but whatever the reason it’s enough. And even though I still hold out hope every week there’s still about two whole seasons of cringe worthy episodes just waiting to be endured. I just can’t anymore and it pains me to say so.

It’s time for us to say goodbye, Glee. I think we need to break up. It’s not me, it’s you and I think it’s just best if we see other shows. We had a good run together but now it’s over and I’m sorry.

I may not have the comfort of being able to watch miniature musicals every week anymore but the trauma of losing Glee isn’t going to hurt my own sing-song lifestyle. I’m still going to belt out the words to music in the car and I’m still going to keep on with singing to myself when I think no one can hear me, that’s just  my personality. But if there’s one lesson I did learn from this it’s when things are going sour sometimes it’s just less painful to let it go rather than keep on for too long and regret it later.

It’s a good metaphor for a lot of things in life when you think about it (Note to Sam: take your own advice). 

Sam xox