Am I a 'Gleek?'

I watched the [final] finale of Glee this weekend. Like many other people, I started watching Glee because I heard about it all the time, and stayed through all the drama and plot holes for the music.

Glee is a show full of fun music and drama-loving characters in the glee club at  William McKinley High School. There are tears, love triangles, and halls filled with vocally-gifted, angsty teenagers.

Glee was a show I watched when I was bored, or wanted to pass a couple hours. I never thought of it with any particular fondness or attachment. But looking back at it, Glee actually did make an impact on my life. Specifically, there was the time when Cory Monteith died.

I've always been awful at knowing and recognizing celebrities, and I can only remember the real-life names of maybe 10 of my favorite actors (most of them BBC actors, of course). But I remember checking out of a grocery store in July 2013 and seeing magazines with Finn Hudson's face and headlines about his death. Well, the death of the actor who played him, Cory Monteith.

When the fifth season aired that Fall, and Finn was in one episode and then not the next, it hit me. He was dead. I had watched several shows up to that point in time, and gone through multiple para-social breakups with characters who were written off those said shows. But this time I knew that the death of a character I liked was because of the death of an actual person, who had his own dreams, skills and overall potential.

That gave me a change in perspective about the relationship between characters and actors, and my own para-social relationships with those individuals.

But to get back to the show Glee itself, I have not liked the most recent season(s).

First off, the show is about a glee club in high school, but then it started following key members of the glee club after they graduated and moved to New York and their college and careers. It was a little strange, but there was still plenty of singing and dancing, so I decided to suffer through the 'college phase,' and kept watching Glee, if you want to call it that. (In general, I would forget to watch it for a month or two, then catch up when I was bored, as opposed to my actively watching shows as soon as they came online each week.)

Season Five should have been the end of Glee, or so I think. It had a lot of unnecessary, post-high school drama, but it seemed to end on a good note. Everything was tied up with a bow: a little breaking of the 4th wall and some snappy musical numbers.

But then, I was surprised when I found out there were new Glee episodes to watch. A sixth season was airing!
This sixth season essentially ripped open our finally-scabbed over cuts that come with the end of a show, and yanked us back into the Glee universe. There was more painful drama, a worse plot (if possible), and in general I think the sixth season should not exist. I have not heard a single person say they loved that Glee was back, or were so excited for each new episode to come out. Not a single person.

The only good thing to come out of season six was the two-part finale. They took the time to really wrap everything up, tell us where the characters were heading, and end for good. This time, there should be no new-season-that-breaks-every-promise-made-in-the-previous-finale or questions about whether or not the show actually ended. This finale was beautiful, made me cry, and is the end of a show to which I gave a good portion of my time.

There may be a lot of hate towards Glee, but it was a fun and very colorful show. I am glad I watched it, but I am also glad there will be no more.

Off to watch other shows,

The Purple Writer