ShareWIK.com

I wanted to love Glee. I really did. From the hyped-up hype from my friends and family (both virtual and actual), it sure sounded like a show I would love. After all, I was the original Gleek. I spent my childhood playing in the back of a local theater called Duffy Playhouse, where my mother was the star attraction. It was ancient even then – velveteen seats so worn in spots the metal casing showed through … the overpowering aromas of pancake makeup, 1000-watt lights and wood varnish.

My mom was community theater royalty. She starred in (or stole the show of) nearly every production for a decade – from Annie Get Your Gun to Funny Girl; Oklahoma! to South Pacific. In one of my earliest memories, I am sitting on my great-grandmother’s lap, in the front row of Duffy’s, staring up at my mom as she points a rifle into the audience and belts out, You Cain’t Get a Man With A Gun.  I know I was just a toddler, because in my hand I’m clutching a box of popcorn – and the box is black and white; they hadn’t even made them in color yet.

My dad was in some of the shows, too, playing up Oklahoma!’s naive Will Parker to the flirtatious Ado Annie; playing the comedic Luther Billis to my mom’s top-billing Nellie in South Pacific.

Nothing made me happier than when my mom or dad would ask me to run lines with them. We shared a love of the playwright’s words … an appreciation for the comedic timing … an admiration for twin soliloquies.

So let’s say you only knew this much about me – wouldn’t you think I was the perfect demographic to fall in love with Glee? Me, too.

It gets worse. I auditioned for nearly every play in middle school and high school, rarely landing a lead but occasionally securing a role that I could turn into something memorable – after hours of coaching from my mother, the original Gypsy Rose Lee stage mother.  In my 20s, my dad and I rarely missed a night of Star Search, even if we had to watch it “together” in different cities. This was long before American Idol. My dad and I loved the show’s backstage drama, the unknowns with voices that were born to be on Broadway; the dancers who pushed the envelope (for the 80s) and ditched disco to give modern dance a whole new twist. 

But most of all we loved the pretext of the show: where any young person with a little guts and a lot of talent could go from nobody to somebody overnight.  While the later version of the show hosted hot young competitors including Usher, Justin Timberlake, Christina Aguilera and Alanis Morissette, it was the first season that had us all dreaming of the day we, too, could be stars; when a 15-year-old from Oklahoma City scored a perfect four stars six weeks in a row to become the teen idol who replaced Donny Osmond on every young girl’s wall. His name was Sam Harris. He was the Kelly Clarkston of Star Search. 

Sam was just a small-town boy with a super-sized voice, who went on to star on Broadway, film and television for two decades.

As you might expect, when I finally found the time to watch Glee (which was just this past summer) I was properly pumped.  I was ready to hear old songs sung a new way; I was prepped to be blown away by ingenious choreography ála Fame (another 80s show my father and I watched religiously). Best of all, with today’s technology, I could watch all of Glee in half the time, uninterrupted on Netflix. I thought I just might watch them all, one after the other, until I was hoarse from singing along.

I wanted to love Glee. But I hated it from the beginning. Oh, I put on a good show.  I smiled. I clapped. I sang along to the oft-publicized Journey revival.  And I made excuses.

“It’s the first show.”  “It’s early in the season.” “They just introduced that character.” “They’re still trying to get their timing/storyline/shit together.”

But after the fifth episode of the second season, I was so totally bored and underwhelmed by the recycled teen angst and unrealistic resolutions (really, she’s pregnant and life goes on in four-part harmony?) that I just couldn’t take it anymore.

As Wired Magazines’s Mary H.K. Choi writes in her perfectly pitched article, Time To Move On, Just Stop Watching: “Give your OCD completism a rest.” She was preaching to my Glee Club drop-out when she wrote, “[Watching] all the seasons, all the time, even if you hate it, does not win you any awards. It’s only there if you want to watch it; if not, become hooked on another show. Netflix, hello.”

So that’s what I did. I fell deeply in lust with Friday Night Lights. Me, a girl who hasn’t watched an entire football game since I cheered in high school nearly 35 years ago, watched all five seasons of FNL in less than 120 days. I even had to buy an upgraded Hulu membership to watch the last season.

I don’t even like football all that much. But that didn’t stop me from loving the show. Because Friday Night Lights isn’t really about the game; it’s about what happens off the field.  Glee could certainly take a cue from the show’s writers (not to mention the coaches). FNL’s coming-of-age storylines rang much truer and were less likely to be all sewn up at the end of the hour (or, in my case, 42 minutes). FNL kids did stupid things and had to face the same consequences my own kid does when he acts his age. The FNL adults made plenty of mistakes, too, and even the star couple – Coach Eric and Tami Taylor – fought and loved and complained like real couples do. It’s for good reason that the Taylors have been praised for portraying one of the most realistic marriages on television.

I didn’t start the summer wanting to love Friday Night Lights. I wanted to love Glee. But no amount of OCD completism could keep me from changing the channel.

In fact, the only thing that MIGHT get me to tune back in is if Tim Riggins suddenly showed up at William McKinley High School to head up the new school musical. And he decided to cast himself in a rendition of Broadway Bares All. That would make me pretty Gleeful.

Ginger is a 20-year veteran corporate writer in Atlanta, and most recently, the former national web editor at skirt!, www.skirt.com. She is a regular blogger for Huffington Post’s divorce vertical (www.huffingtonpost.com/divorce) and skirt.com, the mother of a 16-year-old son, and the author of the hilarious and helpful book, “Back On Top: Fearless Dating After Divorce.” She is a regular ShareWIK.com columnist, and has been featured in More.com, Glamour.com, LovingYou.com and several other women-centric media. She has appeared dozens of local and national TV and radio shows, including as host of Book Talk with Ginger in Atlanta, Georgia. 

For more Ginger Emas columns, click here