Glee

[mothwing]

Maybe I've come down with a series case of the dumb, but I don't get this show. It does bend over backwards to include a whole rainbow of minorities and then still goes out of its way to still make the straight, white, pretty, able-bodied and cisgendered people, usually males, end up in the main character slots and the administrative roles.

It's like watching a compass needle that's made out of the metal that comprises a white, able-bodied, cisgendered, heterosexual, male audience. In this case, it's been shaken up pretty badly by the presence of so many weird and non-white people, but as each episode progresses, you can watch the WACHM main character overcome adversity! I suppose that the show is meant to satirize this fact (or so I hope), but as a satire of other High School TV shows, it does not do a very good job.

Unless "satire" now means "take the storyline you wanted to write, notice that it's stereotypical, slightly exaggerate the stereotypes, let audience, who also doesn't know what "satire" means, think that your show must be a satire of ... well, something. It's clear that they don't mean this, right? That's why it's so exaggerated. Right?

Well, no. A "satire" is more complex than that. It usually focuses on individual shortcomings of the thing it's meant to satirize and exaggerate them with the goal of exposing these shortcomings. I don't see that done very convicingly in that show. If making fun at other High School stereotypes was not their goal, I don't understand what in this series is supposed to do, apart from trying to get more WACHM viewers interested in their local Glee club, because obviously, that's the only target audience that's represented in a mildly respectful way. If that was the intention, well done! And now piss off!

Comments

[lisaquestions.livejournal.com]

I just had to search gmail for replies to my comments on that post. Fortunately, "escapism" appears very infrequently in my mailbox. :)