Glee is Bad. Like, Really Bad.
How did I find out? I’m in the process of rewatching the entire series.
I have a friend who has coined a term she calls “The Chef Boyardee Effect.” She explains it by telling a story about how one day when she was grocery shopping, she pushed her cart past a display of cans of Chef Boyardee. Rushed with memories from her childhood of the second-rate Spaghetti-Os (I said what I said), she thought that the can of noodles and sauce would make for an excellent meal, as that was all she could remember it being back in the day. Before the can could leap off the shelf and follow her home, she threw it in her cart and made her way to the checkout.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take more than a few bites for her to realize that Chef Boyardee, although perhaps worthy of a James Beard Award in her youth, was being savored by someone with a palette refined through years of makeshift meals in the University of Minnesota’s dining hall and plenty of Chopped reruns. In short, now that she was an adult, Chef Boyardee might as well have been Purina Pro.
This is now known as “The Chef Boyardee Effect” among friends, and chances are, you’re already thinking of something that this rule applies to in your life. Family Matters reruns. Pixy Stix. Waking up early on Christmas morning—you know, instead of sleeping in like a normal person.
If I had to pinpoint one thing that resonated with me in my youth, it would undoubtedly have to be Glee, the musical comedy-drama (that did a terrible job trying to find the balance between those two genres) that aired on FOX from 2009 until 2015. For the uninitiated, Glee followed the lives of high school rejects at fictional William McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio. It truly was the show that covered everything: teen pregnancy, LGBTQ+ issues, bullying, religion, body image, texting and driving. The list goes on, but at 13, I didn’t care. When Glee premiered on May 19, 2009, I was nestled right in the center of its demographic, eating up its loony characters and covers of top 40 hits. And I wasn’t the only one. The first season averaged 9.77 million total viewers. By 2011, the show was generating $2 million advertising revenue per half hour. That same year, Chris Colfer collected a Golden Globe for his efforts (and, blurring the lines between herself and Rachel Berry, Lea Michele wept on national television.).
I was a brace-faced theatre kid fresh off a run as “Liesl” in my middle school’s production of The Sound of Music, with Broadway obviously on the horizon. Glee, I felt, was created for me. It was about underdogs who could sing, and in my mind, that was who I was. Every week, I tuned in without fail, eyes glued to the TV as adults pretended to be teenagers learned their lesson of the week and wrapped everything up with a nice group number. I used to walk down to a neighbor’s house, where a bunch of fellow Gleeks would watch together and then discuss how ridiculous it was that Finn was getting back with Quinn during the commercial breaks. My freshman year of high school, I was gifted tickets to the Glee Live! Tour—my very first concert. This factoid, as you can imagine, gets a great variety of reactions whenever I share it at parties.
I can’t remember exactly when I fell off of the Glee wagon. I know it was some time in the show’s fourth season, when storylines of beloved characters got truncated in order to make room for the new fleet of cast members that were suddenly on my beloved show. Plotlines became muddled (although, they had gotten this way far before the fourth season premiered), song choices became more of a gimmick to sell singles on iTunes instead of musical selection being done to, say, further a story. I quietly stopped turning the channel to FOX each Tuesday (it may have been Thursday at that point, I can’t be bothered to plunge that deep into the recesses of my brain to remember) and fell in love with television that, while not perfect, respected me as a viewer a hell of a lot more than Glee could ever dream of doing.
And then, came this past summer. I wish I could remember what gave me the final push to do it, but as I’ve come to find out, anything having to do with Glee is much like the show itself: feverish and done hastily, so as to avoid thinking about it for too long. For whatever reason, I noticed that people on the Internet (mainly Twitter) had taken to roasting Glee like never before. Having never truly revisited the show since I had originally stopped watching (besides a few stray episodes here and there), I decided to do one of the worst things for my health possible, and began rewatching Glee.
At first, it was like a little secret that only I possessed, and only allowed myself to know about. I felt like how dieting soccer moms must feel sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to have a Skinny Cow ice cream bar. I hoarded episodes of the show. I had unearthed a real guilty pleasure. Wanting to find some kind of supplement to the chaos, I sought out a Glee-centric podcast that would hopefully poke fun at all of the plot holes and ridiculous that lays within each episode. I lucked out and found Sam and Maggie Hate Glee, a “Glee recap podcast” where siblings Sam and Maggie Carr eviscerate Glee into ribbons each week. I consumed Glee with wild abandon, sometimes finishing three or four episodes in one sitting. This must be what Saturn felt like, I thought one night after finishing season one’s “Mattress,” when he was devouring his son.
My secret didn’t stay secret for long. My roommate found out that I was rewatching Glee, the show that had practically become synonymous with my name in high school amongst my peers. At first, she laughed and shook her head, leaving me to the bed I was making for myself to lie in. But after a while, things started turning around.
“Do you want to watch the episode of Glee that made me stop watching?”
Dedicated to getting my roommate on board in this mission, there was no way I could turn down her offer. Both curled up on the couch, we skipped ahead and watched season three’s “On My Way,” which addresses (and I am not making this up) teen suicide, teen marriage, and texting and driving all within the span of an hour.
“This was it,” she told me as the credits rolled, my mouth probably still hanging open in shock as I was reminded of the ridiculousness of Quinn’s all-caps text of “ON MY WAY” to Rachel before getting t-boned by a semi-truck. “This was the episode that made me quit Glee forever. It was just so… dumb.”
My sister was similar. We grew up watching Glee together, and she continued watching it for far longer than I did, eventually finishing the show entirely. After watching an episode with my roommate and me one evening and having fun riffing about actors’ poor lip-synching skills and Glee’s constant continuity issues, she texted me the next day.
“Can I come over again and watch Glee?”
At the risk of sounding like Carrie Bradshaw, I couldn’t help but wonder: was there really that much joy to be found in hate-watching Glee?
As of this writing, I am continuing my march (more like a durge, really) towards the end of Glee. Watching the show for a second time, particularly the early seasons, it is impossible to ignore how truly cursed this show was from the very beginning. Too many eerie lines of dialogue exist from Finn and Puck about dying, or pedophilia, or drugs (the actors who played those characters, Cory Monteith and Mark Salling, respectively, each died; Monteith via drug overdose in 2013, and Salling after committing suicide following a child pornography possession arrest in 2018). There’s an entire song in season one where Finn raps about how he’s drug-free. Characters are heinously written; plot inconsistencies abound. I just finished watching the episode where Will, the director of the New Directions, asks Finn, his student, to be the best man at his wedding. I am very, very slowly, but surely, headed towards the finish line.
Despite feeling like I’m in the weeds 99 percent of the time, there are rare, fleeting moments that I’ve stumbled across that have reminded me why I loved Glee so much back when it was in its prime. The show’s first season, laced with plenty of witty quips from Sue Sylvester and enough throwaway jokes to write an episode of one of Seth McFarlane’s TV shows, is objectively good. It isn’t until the second season gets going and we’re subjected to lessons of the week, ranging from alcohol abuse to homelessness. In the third season, you take what you can get. Sure, it’s problematic, but there is slightly-ok-I-guess-I’ll-take-it-if-I-have-to lesbian representation. While the show doesn’t utilize them enough as they should, there are genuinely talented cast members. Wish I could say the same about the writing staff. Or the production crew, for that matter.
I can’t help but wonder, however, how long it’s going to take for The Chef Boyardee Effect to begin manifesting in my Netflix queue. Which episode will make me want to tap out entirely? The one where they push Artie into a pool while he’s still using his wheelchair? Or maybe it’s the one where they haphazardly address trans issues? Which social issue does Ryan Murphy and his ragtag team of writers need to absolutely misfire at before I call Uncle?
I can’t help but wonder, however, if The Chef Boyardee Effect gets to apply to something as horrible as Glee. Maybe Glee, in its own special way, gets to exist within this caveat of nostalgia. Maybe, just maybe, Glee is so bad its good.
I’ll let you know when I get to the end.
