A DAD'S LIFE:Hit TV drama pushes all the right buttons, writes ADAM BROPHY
GUILTY PLEASURE number, well, I don’t know, but it’s a high one: American musical comedy-drama Glee.
I like it for a number of reasons. The storyline is so thin you don’t have to watch it in any particular order. Figuring it out is easier than Eastenders. Even if you’ve backtracked it doesn’t matter because the outcome of any story arc is irrelevant as there is no emotional investment in a single character. There is no discernible realism present. This is important if you’re in TV flick mode after a stressful time putting the kids to bed.
I also like the music. Shoot me. Cute teen kids bopping to rock/pop classics makes me smile. The juxtaposition of Don’t Stop Believing in Glee and as the soundtrack to the final scene of The Sopranos left me tapping feet.
But what’s best is its ability to switch from high school panto nastiness/sweetness cliché to the philosophy of the psychotic in a heartbeat. Responsible for this is cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, whose reason for being is the destruction of the Glee club and her own personal annihilation of its leader, Will Schuester. My favourite Sylvester quote (speaking to Schuester): “You’ll be adding revenge to the long list of things you’re no good at, right next to being married, running a high school glee club and finding a hairstyle that doesn’t look like a lesbian.”
You read that and you know, yes, this is a high school drama, related in part to Sweet Valley High, but this is not for kids. So why has Glee been suffering a backlash in the States? Apparently, it is not providing appropriate moral values for our children.
What? When did TV programming assume responsibility for imbuing my kids with moral standards? Last time I checked, that was my job and one which I wrestle with and perform with mixed success. If TV were responsible, to return to Eastenders, wouldn’t we all behave like the Mitchells? Wouldn’t there be a slightly higher body count than the current already inappropriately inflated one? I’d be offing every dodgy geezer who looked sideways at my skin and blister.
But back to Glee. Why would parents let small kids watch this? All right, it has cute toothy girls in cheerleader outfits, so you may be forgiven for thinking it’s Hannah Montana related. For about a minute. It’s based, like most dramas, on good against bad, it throws in the West Side Story storyline of kids and adults from different tribes attempting to cross-pollinate and it has the added kicker of spicing the whole pot up with a little over-the-top musical showmanship.
In this house we’re still a long way from the emotional minefield that will be a child negotiating the big school, but I don’t think anyone alive is so far removed from that particular dilemma that they don’t remember its challenges. Some mornings I wake and can taste the late 1980s. I have a dread of double Latin in my stomach, crushed against a combo of anxiety and excitement presented by the probability of speaking to whichever girl I was in love with that week. Stress brings school back to me.
And there’s the dilemma. As parents we all know that school will test our kids. It will allow them the opportunity to make lifelong friends and experience a kaleidoscope of sparkling bright moments. It will also put them alongside people they fear, people who threaten them and situations for which they have no previous experience. School is life distilled to its most primal essence. Whatever you experience later on out in the world will, for the most part, be boundaried by rational thought. There is no such assurance in the schoolyard.
That’s what makes it such good entertainment. From The Catcher In The Rye and Blackboard Jungle, up through Grange Hill, The Breakfast Club and Dead Poets’ Society, Australia’s Heartbreak High and now Glee, high school drama allows us a peek into a life where the id leaves ego and superego trailing far behind. Just don’t go looking there for family policy.