Thursday, September 10, 2009

Review: Glee is not High School Musical

I really don't want to spend a lot of time on this. There is just so much I'm overwhelmed. So I'll be brief.

Glee is a terrible show, especially if you are a Christian who doesn't like the world's values changing. They clearly have an agenda. They do the classic technique that I am seeing so often today. They must have conflict but they don't understand subtlety so they make everything black and white. The writers portray the things they don't like as negatively as possible just so they can set up a change of heart.

Example 1) The wife of the main character is not a nice person. She is awful. Then they show how the guidance councelor (an otherwise very nice person) is in love with the same main character. Clearly they want the wife and the husband to divorce so the guidance councelor to get together. See? They set up a terrible situation so they can end it and provide an ideal situation.

Example 2) The glee club needs more members so they are going to have a rally in front of the whole school. It is completely lame and the glee club students know it. So they decide to change the routine to a very sexy show, far too explicit for a high school rally. Again, they set up a bad situation so they can counter it with a far more pleasant one.

Example 3) They show a "chastity club" event. Well the christian in me shouts for joy at that idea. Fantastic! And lo and behold the bad girl, a gorgeous cheerleader, is in charge of the whole club! Good for her. Of course this comes after a scene in which she tries to bribe her boyfriend into quitting the glee club by offering up a feel of her breast. Anyway, her hypocrocy isn't the issue, it's the way the writers portrayed the chastity club. They apparently don't think of a chastity club as a way for high school students to get together for wholesome non-sexual activities, nor in lessons by a responsible knowledgeable adult about the dangers of engaging in sexual activity so young. No, they apparently think that a chastity club is an excuse for boys and girls to get together and indulge in sexual activities! They begin by showing how the girls talk about using their bodies to manipulate boys and they show the boys talking about girls in the most disrespectful ways. They have absolutely no interest in being chaste. But that is nothing compared to the activities that happen when the boys and girls get together during their meetings. In this meeting, they take a blown up balloon and I guessed that maybe they would pass the balloon from person to person by only using their mouths or something. Well I didn't like that idea but then I soon found out how wrong I was. They didn't kiss the balloons. They used the balloons to allow them to grind their hips together. Each couple would hold the balloon up in the air with their hips, and they would proceed to grind on each other, as if they were making love with the balloon between them. I could actually hear in my mind the thousands of Christian parents around the country turning the TV show off telling their kids that enough is enough and their kids would not ever be watching this show. And shame on any Christian parent that actually watched that scene with their kids and did NOT turn the TV off.

Back to the balloon scene. The cheerleader's boyfriend ends up popping the balloon, thus killing an angel according to the bad christian cheerleader. Then of COURSE the main female character has to jump in and tell the whole group how groups like that one actually end up causing more teen pregnancies than sexual education about contraceptives and such. Why one of the characters actually berated her for "using the C word!" What the crap???? How utterly cliche! Of COURSE programs like that one would fail. That one encouraged indulging in sexual thoughts and activities! It's all well and good to teach about contraceptives but the first thing you must teach is that abstinence is the only appropriate option!

I really dislike how they paired the antagonist (the female cheerleader) with Christian values while the good girl believes in, or at least enables, progressive attitudes towards sex. They clearly want to fight the belief in chastity.

If you are a Christian parent, please don't let your chlldren watch this show. They are not teaching Christian family values. They are teaching new post-modern progressive ideas that pre-marital sexuality should not only be tolerated, it should be embraced.

King of the Hill gets one right.

I still stand by what I said about King of the Hill being a completely evil show, but they did do one thing right. For several seasons one of the main characters' wife (Nancy) was having an affair. They made it a big joke because Dale is the type of person who suspects everyone of everything, yet he is clueless of the obvious hints that his wife is cheating on him. Cute. Shoot! His child is clearly the son of a Native American and he still never puts two and two together! I hated this part of the show but finally they did the right thing. Nancy fell back in love with her husband and ended her affair. And the show in which it all comes out is handled very poignently.

I think this might be the only thing the writers of this show have ever done right.