Letter from the Editor 11.06.2019

I’ve always had a fondness for bad tv—maybe it was because I liked high school and these teen shows remind me of that time (albeit with a lot more drama than my life actually had). Maybe it’s because I’ve still got some growing up to do. 

But throw me a middlebrow teen dramedy and I’m there—Pretty Little Liars, Riverdale, even Buffy the Vampire Slayer. 

A month or so ago, I finally bit the bullet and started watching the pinnacle of all shitty teen dramas — Glee. Maybe I just wanted to better understand the Twitter jokes or references I’d heard friends batting around for years. I’m not sure why I never started it when it came out. Sure, I knew what was going on, who Kurt and Blaine and Rachel and Finn were, but it just passed me by. 

Now that I’ve started, I can see it for what it is: a hot mess best used as background noise, a little annoying but compulsively watchable. I feel myself back in high school again, watching television in the basement, thinking about the chicken patty I’d probably eat for lunch the next day. It’s the nostalgia, really, that gets me. As my life gets ready to change a lot, I double back to the familiar interface of Netflix and try something new within a genre I know inside out. There’s a certain comfort in it, and a sadness, knowing that things are about to change. But we’ll always have Glee.