Glee's Vendetta Against Low Self-Esteem

As a disclaimer, neither of us have ever watched a single episode of The Glee Project, which we're incredibly thankful for after hearing about the finale. For its first season closer, the show decided on the worst twist to ever hit reality TV: everyone wins.

Yup, all of the final four contestants of The Glee Project won the grand prize: a handful of minor roles in Fox's biggest success story to date. Apart from being undeniably lame, we've come to understand that--considering the counterpart to the reality show--this "twist" was also inevitable. Why? you ask. Because, we'll tell you, Glee has completely abandoned any of its former mystery and turned itself into a Lifetime-predictable, hour-long self esteem booster.   

Glee started out well. It put a somewhat edgy and very fresh face on prime time television. The music might have given it popularity but what really drew the audience in was the believability and sheer loveableness of the insecure, messed-up-in-their-own-way high school characters.

Now at the height of its third season, Glee has lost almost all of its haywire charm. It has sacrificed good writing and an original storyline to promote a message that any L'Oreal ad could promote just as well. At the beginning of each episode, the characters are presented with the same problem: a run-of-the-mill insecurity that plagues 95% of high schoolers. Then, by the end of that episode, that insecurity is rectified in some way.

But, at the beginning of the very next episode, the same exact insecurity pops up again. To make things simple, Glee has fallen into a terrible cycle. They want people to feel good about themselves. They don't care about anything else, least of all keeping their characters as believable as they were originally.

Honestly, if I wanted to boost my sense of self-worth, I'd watch Oxygen. The Bad Girls Club will make any halfway decent lady feel like the Queen of England. This "twist" at the end of The Glee Project just epitomizes everything Glee has become: a show that, ultimately, is about making people like themselves more than they should.

Bottom line: Glee needs to rediscover what made it pure gold in the first place. It needs to take back that edginess and abandon its agenda to raise everyone's self esteem. In The Glee Project, everyone won, but Glee needs to go back to promoting messages of reality: that, in life, more often than not, nobody wins and everyone stays insecure about the same things until they die.