I Really Disliked Glee; Also, Did I Go to School on Mars?

I've been making an effort to narrow my horizons and watch more television lately, which led me to download the pilot episode of Glee, the high school glee club comedy that had received such good reviews. I can't say I really liked it--I've never seen a show with so many unpleasant, stupid, shallow female stereotypes, and yes, I have watched America's Next Top Model! Seriously, EVERY SINGLE WOMAN on this show is a shrill, manipulative, neurotic, bossy, backstabbing caricature, even the supposedly down-to-earth little brunette glee girl who, um, tries to steal another girl's boyfriend, which in my opinion makes her just as unsympathetic as the stuck-up cheerleader.

The married women bully their spineless schlub husbands--one asks permission to use the bathroom, and is denied. It's not even biting satire, just unfunny. Meanwhile, the only attractive adult male on the cast is married, yet not in the least bit convincingly heterosexual. Paging Hugh Jackman! Rumor has it you may be gay but at least you can sing AND dance AND play straight. This song-and-dance show needs some testosterone before the women explode in a giant pent-up estrogen bomb. Yes, I'm a sexist pig. What these women need is a man!

I also had trouble sympathizing with the poor little lonelyhearts guidance counselor after she counsels a student with bulimia by cracking a joke about the gag reflex, then flirts with the married man. WTF, can none of the women on this show find a man of their own? I mean, sure, in my own high school half the teachers really were screwing each other, but I thought this was supposed to be a comedy, not Melrose High 90210 XOXO Gossip Glee.

I made it ten minutes through the second episode before giving up. The second episode starts with Spineless Schlubby Husband #3 telling his son how he lacked confidence in life and a man needs balls if he's going to accomplish anything. Yeah, especially if he wants to write a TV show with realistic female characters that don't make me want to commit mass gynocide!

ANYWAY, it did make me start wondering about depictions of high school in movies, books, and on TV. Admittedly my references are dated (Heathers, 10 Things I Hate About You, Beverly Hills 90210, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Breakfast Club), but watching Glee made me realize that not much has changed in the high school genre over the years. I am starting to wonder: Did I attend school on Mars? Was my school part of some kind of government experiment? (I wonder this about a lot of things actually.)

I went to a medium-sized school in rural Pennsylvania, with 200 kids in my graduating class of '91. The school had a total of about 1000 students, not counting the junior high across the street.

Maybe it was because my school was so far out in the sticks, but the usual Formula as set forth by the Gospel of the Breakfast Club just didn't seem to strictly apply. I know you have seen The Breakfast Club, but to refresh your memory, five kids, each part of a different clique, are assigned to Saturday detention. They are forced to interact, work together, and learn to see each other as complex human beings, despite their labels: Jock, Nerd, Criminal, Princess, and Basketcase. The Basketcase girl today might be considered more of an artsy Goth, but the rest are close enough to current stereotypes.

I just don't think these labels applied at my school, which was almost entirely populated with ordinary, well-rounded, complicated people. Like, human beings. The labels applied; they just didn't stick. In general, kids swapped labels, wearing two or three at a time, or ignored the labels and did whatever they wanted. People grew and changed. A boy who was a Jock freshman year became a total Basketcase by senior year (druggie, Beat poets, long hair, tie-dye, always late to school and class because he stopped wearing a watch so as not to be bound by the false constraints of society.) Particularly, the crossover between the Nerds and the Princess or Popular kids was extremely high. Most of the popular kids were not ditsy, spoiled shopaholics, but honors students. What can I say--flunking algebra was just not considered cool. It was not unusual to see a group of football players studying with nerds or kids in the marching band during study hall. Who else would you turn to for help with trigonometry?

I can't believe that my little hick town high school was so unique. Is it because it was totally hick? Maybe in a larger school, in a big city, people need to form tighter cliques in order to have an identity apart from the crowd. My school was more like a small family-owned company where every employee has to play several roles, because there isn't enough staff to go around.

For example, one varsity football player in my class was part of the Jock/Princess crowd, but was also a skateboarder who wrote poetry and published his own zine and solicited literary contributions from the Nerd/Basketcase crowd. We had study hall together, so although we were not friends outside of school, we'd sit in the library and talk about books. He obviously was not pressured to pick on me or ignore me because I was not part of the popular crowd. If this were a high school on TV, he'd be throwing a Slushie in my face and making lewd comments and tripping me in the hall. Instead he shared copies of his poems. Alas, he did date a cheerleader, but he also took honors English and math--hardly a stereotypical dumb jock.

I saw TV shows where jocks beat up on druggies or nerds, but never thought it happened in real life. As I once put it to a friend, "The jocks can't beat up on the druggies--then who would they buy their drugs from?" Our football players were routinely stoned, which might be why we only won one game in two years. Come to think of it, this might also explain the unusual mellowness of my school's cliques. (Hmm...could a solution for bullying really be this obvious?)

Contrary to the usual image of the cheerleaders as popular, beautiful superbitches, our cheerleaders were not voted on by the student body but chosen by the coaches, who to their credit based their choices on merit. We had a fat cheerleader with a pimply complexion who also played flute in the marching band. So much for the Popular Cheerleaders vs. Hopeless Band Camp Nerd cliché.

We had a knobby-kneed, bony, kinky-haired cheerleader who wore glasses and was otherwise distinguished for being the only student to receive a Perfect Attendance award for all four years of high school. Being a cheerleader did not win her automatic entry into the popular crowd, but she wasn't a total outcast, either. She probably couldn't have dated the handsome, popular jock--the rules of mating would require more Clockwork Orange-style tampering with human nature to make that happen--but no one stopped her from shaking her pom-poms.

We had cheerleaders who were pretty and popular too, of course. But it wasn't like an exclusive club, more like just any other school activity, like yearbook or track. True, the football cheerleaders did seem to outrank mere basketball cheerleaders (there were two squads as I recall, not sure why) but so what--any girl who wanted to could cheer. They weren't into advanced gymnastics or choreography, so no backflips or splits were required, just enthusiasm. Probably if a girl in a wheelchair had wanted to cheer, she could have made the team.

On TV, the cheerleaders are rich, bitchy ice queens who rule the school with sarcasm and sex appeal, phony shopaholics who are 16 going on 26. Maybe I'm being cruel, but I don't recall there being enough genuinely beautiful girls in my class for anyone to pull off that attitude. Even our homecoming queen was a popular girl known for being both smart and nice to everyone. She was pretty enough in a plain way, skinny, with freckles, light brown hair and eyes. But she was far from stylish or flashy. She lived on a farm and often wore jeans and plaid button-down shirts and boots to school. She was part of the 4H Club and was the kind of girl who entered calves in competitions at the county fair. Hardly your typical Bridezilla-like prom queen, or Gossip Girl material.

My younger brother was a varsity football player who grew up to be a schoolteacher. I know I've heard this line more than once: the lunkhead footballer bullies the nerd, who spits back, "Laugh now, someday you're going to be working for me!" I think that must be the writer's wishful thinking rather than reality, where being athletic does not exclude the possibility of being smart enough to have a white-collar profession. President Obama is often shown playing basketball with his friends. Is he just a stupid jock?

Maybe my school felt more relaxed because although some kids definitely had more money than others, we were all at roughly the same socioeconomic level, and we were so isolated that it wasn't like anyone could buy clothes from anywhere other than the same two malls within an hour drive. Unless you drove two hours to New York or Philadelphia you were stuck with the local mall.

Also, the status symbols in the 80s and early 90s were not nearly as intense as today--we didn't have cell phones or I-Pods or $250 Coach and Louis Vuitton handbags, or Tiffany's sterling silver bracelets. But you did have to have, say (straining memory), Bongo or Guess jeans and Reebok or Nike sneakers. We obsessed about brand names, but the brand names weren't SO far out of reach--even a poorer kid could usually work a part-time job after school and afford at least one pair of $60 jeans (which was at the time considered expensive--no-name jeans would be $25-40).

Stuff like I-Phones and $150 Lucky jeans hadn't yet hit the scene. My sister tells me that now my 15-year-old niece is not content with drugstore cosmetics like Revlon and L'Oreal; she is angry that she can't shop at Sephora and buy $40 MAC powder like her friends. Maybe it's just that today's princesses have it a lot harder than we did in the 80s.

I'm wondering if my high-school experience was truly that unique, or if it's just easier, for the sake of drama and simple, one-dimensional characters, for writers to keep falling back on The Formula. Even in The Breakfast Club they eventually realized that there was more to themselves than the labels slapped on them by adults. So why do kids put up with these tired cliches? Isn't it kind of boring? I just don't even find it entertaining anymore.

I'd much rather watch a TV show that reflected my stranger-than-fiction reality, where chubby girls became cheerleaders, a super-hot girl won a scholarship to an elite private school purely based on academic merit, the popular 16-year-old blonde got knocked up by her 25-year-old boyfriend, the rich kid worked at Kmart because his father wanted him to grow up "with values," and the jock coached younger kids in an after-school sports program.

I think this sounds like a job for the cable and premium TV networks! HBO, Showtime, A&E, where are you when I need you? You've made a show about a mobster who sees a therapist, a suburban stay-at-home mom who sells marijuana, a high-school chemistry teacher who manufactures crystal meth to pay for his cancer treatments, a serial killer who is one of the good guys. Surely you can come up with a show set in high school that isn't totally stupid?