Glee

Glee is the latest TV show that has taken Londoners by storm after a very successful first series in the US. The story is simple: take High School Musical, make it a little bit more grown up and turn it into a TV series.

The ingredients are all there: a group of kids that don't quite fit in but they bond over singing (and boy do they sing!), an inspirational teacher, an evil teacher who cares only about the cool and popular kids and who is against the singing club, some modern teenage themes (being cool at school and being losers at school, someone is pregnant, someone is gay, someone is fat, someone is disabled, others come from minorities etc etc) and lots of feel good singalong moments.

It all sounds perfect for Hana Montana teenage girls fans looking to branch out to yet another unrealistic American drama. So why does everybody love Glee? Women, men, young, old, commoners, celebrities, gays and straights?

Surely it is not because it reminds us of high school times: these TV shows are obviously written by people who have forgotten how awkward high school days were and keep portraying teenagers as super confident mini adults. My high school choir days were definitely nothing like Glee.

And it is not because we identify with any of the characters in particular: they all seem to be quite uni dimensional, characterised only by the one thing that they are (gay, cool, cute, ugly, loser).

These people are modern day's smurf. But then again, everyone loves the smurfs, and it might well be because their uni dimensional lives make more digestible the complexity of real people, including ourselves. It's like dealing with 'one thing at the time', rather than trying to make sense of all things at once.

Glee is like that. Each piece of the show represents something we are or we have been, whether it is a particular aspiration, a dream, a fall, an experience. Just like the smurfs Glee can simplify the myriad of things we have experienced when we were young and that have changed us forever.

But whilst in high school we spent hours in our rooms masturbating and trying to make sense of what was going on, the Glee kids just dance and sing it all off, and they seem happy and free at the end of it.

Perhaps Glee is much more realistic than we think. Just a little more abstract.

I hate it. However, I have seen all episodes.

What's your view?