Mission Statement (and F.A.Q.)

We enjoy making fun of Glee. People read our posts and thus this website continues to exist. Having said that, Glee is a horrendous show, and here are a few reasons why:

1. The entire premise of the show makes no sense.

The audience is constantly beat over the head with the fact that these kids are unpopular losers. These students are all attractive and talented, but are hated because…they sing pop music? We don’t know what viewers are supposed to do with the numerous scenes when the Glee Club performs and the crowds leap to their feet and just go wild. Aside from this very basic issue, the show is filled with sloppy writing and inconsistencies. The writers seem to have no plan or real idea what they are doing, and just slap a plot together around some songs that they got the rights to. Some examples

Sue Sylvester is an evil character whose main purpose is to destroy the Glee Club, except for the times when she is a good character trying to save the Glee Club.

Prior to last season’s New York finale,  Quinn ominously declared that she had a “plan” for when they all went to New York. Nothing ever happened with this, and it was literally never mentioned again.

Another time, a girl was kicked off the Cheerleading squad and it was a pretty big moment other than the fact that, oops, Glee had written that club out of the show 7 episodes before that.

2. Glee frequently claims to be about arts education, but is really all about money.

When the Kings of Leon denied Glee the rights to use one of their songs, Glee creator Ryan Murphy responded by saying (and we quote):

“Fuck you, Kings of Leon. They’re self-centered assholes, and they missed the big picture. They missed that a 7-year-old kid can see someone close to their age singing a Kings of Leon song, which will maybe make them want to join a glee club or pick up a musical instrument. It’s like, OK, hate on arts education. You can make fun of Glee all you want, but at its heart, what we really do is turn kids on to music.”

Thank God that someone is finally making the music of Lady Gaga and Britney Spears accessible to children!

Glee is a glorified cover band, promoting music that is already extremely popular among teens. It is like when a soft drink company advertises a movie on their bottle, and in turn their product is put into that movie. Glee makes tons of money off their albums, and in exchange, Glee gives more exposure to the bands who originally recorded the songs. When Leonard Bernstein did his televised Young People’s Concerts with the New York Philharmonic in the 60′s, that was arts education. He introduced children to great works of art  and the program became fairly popular because he was a genius. It is sad that Glee is able to achieve the same stature by regurgitating the cheapest parts of popular culture and insisting that it is education.

By the way, Glee is filled with the traditional product placement as well.

3. Glee is a movement, but in the shallowest ways possible.

Glee has been very effective in forming a community of people who feel defined and validated by the show. A perfect example is a recent email we received:

I love Glee because all my life I’ve been completely tormented and Glee understands what it’s like to be an outcast. When people hate Glee, it’s like they are screaming in your face, “You suck! You are a fake! You’re just a loser!” Glee makes me feel like I’m apart of something, you know? Glee encourages to always like who you are, and you can think what you want- I won’t try to change your opinions, but I hope that you can see why some of us depend on Glee so much. It’s our voice.

More than anything, that email crystallizes what we really dislike about this whole “movement”. Fans tend to use the show to define themselves, and thus they feel that any attack on the show is an attack on them.

To these fans, we say: Don’t let Glee be your voice, because it doesn’t stand for anything. Glee is at its core, simple consumerism. The entire point of the show is to sell, and any kind of art or comedy gets homogenized^[1] and pureed^[2] into something palatable to the masses.

Beyond that, Glee doesn’t unite, it divides. The two of us didn’t always fit in, and I think that almost everyone can identify with feeling like an outcast. To claim that experience is something unique to fans of the show is silly and dismissive—”not fitting in” is an overwhelmingly common teenage experience. We find it extremely disgusting that Glee takes advantage of these feelings in order to set itself up as a movement representing the “outcasts”.

4. Glee has a very narrow view of bullying and discrimination

Glee has been touted as a show that “fights bullying”. While technically true, we would say that Glee does a terrible job at this. Glee’s definition of bullying is as narrow as possible: a big mean jock pushing a gay kid around. They seem to gloss over the bits where Kurt himself is bullying other kids^[3]. When you narrow down bullying and discrimination to “don’t use these words” and “don’t do that”, you’ve effectively made a roadmap for racists and bullies^[4]. If you want to do a responsible commentary of bullying and discrimination, look below the surface. Maybe don’t have so many terrible, discriminatory statements and acts of bullying in your own show^{[5][6][7][8][9]}.

5. Glee is touted as a show promoting gay rights, but probably does more to undermine them.

Ryan Murphy clearly was desperate to show a gay character in a positive light. We get that, it makes sense. We’re all in for having normal, accessible gay characters in our movies and TV. However, Kurt is not normal or accessible. They tried so hard to make him a hero, but they forgot to make him human.

Early on in the show, Kurt had two modes: “Asshole” or “Persecuted”. If no one was picking on him, then he was busy being an asshole, and if he was being kicked around, he was suddenly the poor gay kid that people are being mean to for no reason. That was annoying enough, but then the character developed to some sort of diety. Rachel wants a nose job? Everyone tries to convince her otherwise, but she only listens to Kurt. It looks like Kurt is hooking up with Sam? It can’t be, Kurt is perfect. You want to become prom queen? Just bring Kurt back to school, because apparently everyone loves him now.

 F.A.Q.

There are a bunch of questions that we get, and it’s super annoying, so we’re gonna go ahead and answer them here.

Q. If you hate Glee, why do you watch it?
A. We hate Glee, but we really love writing jokes about it. As it turns out, a lot of people like to read our jokes, so that’s nice too.

Q. Don’t you know that you’re just raising their ratings?
A. Doubtful. We’re not part of the 0.02183% of Americans tracked by Nielsen, plus we usually don’t watch the show on TV or Hulu. When it comes to Glee, we have no issues with digital piracy.

Q. Don’t you idiots know that Glee is a satire?
A. We don’t appreciate that kind of name calling, and no, it’s not a satire. People often state that Glee is meant to be a satire, and they often point to Ryan Murphy’s previous project, “Popular” as proof of this. However, Ryan Murphy always meant to have Glee be a completely different show than Popular. To quote the man himself:

“To me, it’s a completely different tone. It’s a completely different show. The thing with Popular was Popular was a satire that made fun of everything else on that network at the time” – HollyWood Chicago interview

So put that in your pipe and smoke it. Who’s the idiot now, hypothetical straw man Gleek?

Q. Don’t you have anything better to do?
A. First of all, you’re the one reading Glee Sucks Dot Com, so I don’t imagine you spend your time rescuing kittens and teaching math skills to disadvantaged youths. You’re right, though, we do have a lot of better things to do, and we actually do them. However, in addition to those things, we also write this blog.

Here are a list of things that one or both of us do on a regular basis (one or two of which may not be true):

• Read books
• Write comedy (it’s not even mostly Glee-related)
• All the duties that come with the lofty title of “Graduate Assistant”
• Perform stand up
• Rock climb
• Develop Mobile Applications
• Barbeque
• Shoot heroin
• Playing violin
• Drink beer
• Listen to Podcasts (we like WTF and Walking The Room, among others)
• Hunt for buried treasure

If you have any further questions, go ahead and hit the “Contact Us” button, and we’ll get back to you with a snarky response.

Note: Gearing up for the third season, we wrote a new mission statement, since we thought the old one was a bit out of date. If you’re interested in reading the old Mission Statement, or the many comments on it, you can find that here.