GLEE's Lack Of Showtunes These Days...

It Just Makes Me Mad Because It Started Off As A Musical Based Show, & Now It's Doing A Bunch Of Crappy Pop Songs Hint: "Let's Have a Kiki / Turkey Lurkey Time." "Gangnam Style: I Know They Are Trying To Appeal To A Different Audience But I Think They Should Go Back To Their Roots. I'm Pretty Satisfied With "All That Jazz" & "Being Alive" Though :)

Oh Yes, Turkey Lurkey is one, Yeah it wasn't used a lot. But this Season, So Far, there hasn't been much show tunes.

I actually read earlier this year the producers were blaming the ratings slide and music sales drop on the "less popular" music. They were making an intentional push for more recognizable pop music and more 'songs of the moment' (gimmicky crap like "Gangnam Style.")

Cause, you know the ratings slide could in NO way be due to ridiculous character inconsistencies, after-school special plots, and ear-splattering auto-tuning.

Glee has relied on memetic hit songs to ensure it stays relevant and that the albums sell since the start.

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Glee has relied on memetic hit songs to ensure it stays relevant and that the albums sell since the start.

Absolutely. But I think the mix used to be more 50/50 (with the first 50% including show tunes and pop/rock standards and the rest recent charters). Now it's more like 10/90, which for an old-timer like me is less interesting.

But that's to be expected: I'm about a decade outside their target demo.

However I really did enjoy learning new Katy Perry songs back when they were better mixed with Judy Garland songs. Now that it's almost all new music, it tends to sound alike to me. (And, no, the auto-tuning doesn't help.)

(ETA I should have acknowledged CapnHook's point: yes, the GREASE episodes were exceptions to what seems to be the new format.)

Updated On: 12/3/12 at 10:39 PM

I hear Chita Rivera is very upset about this.

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For the record, my single favorite GLEE song to date was Darren Criss and the Warblers' cover of Perry's "Teenage Dream", a song I had never heard at the time.

So I'm not opposed to everything written since 1990.

It's a shame. The show was never good, but it was fun watching older songs (both showtunes and others) get a new exposure to a new generation. From Journey to Queen to Barbra to "Gypsy," I really enjoyed seeing what they would do next.

Then it turned into the Top 40 show, where it looked like the writers got a copy of Billboard magazine that day and went down the Hot 100 list.

That's when I stopped watching, and I don't think I was the only one.

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This Christmas will be a crossover episode with the New Normal's Nana visiting her sister Sue Sylvester in Lima. I can't wait to hear all the "offensive" names she'll call those Glee kids.

The tonal shift of the show from pitch-black comedy where everyone was a target to sassy comedy of empowerment and social justice did the show a great deal of harm.

On the one hand, it's become a powerful media advocate for LGBTQ youth, I don't deny that. And it's probably done them a great deal of good. But at the same time, doing so ruined the central concept of the show- a group of oddballs and losers, none particularly likable or three-dimensional, treating glee club (the lowest rung of the performing arts) like absurdly serious business in the face of a tyrannical and bigoted sociopath in teacher's clothing.

And then, one day- oh, these characters, they're not just silly people or grotesques, they're PEOPLE too! And show choir suddenly IS serious business. Any character or plot twist that didn't fit the new focus disappeared, whether it needed to or not.

Yes, GLEE's cover of "We Are Young" is in fact what made Fun. go mainstream and gain a lot of popularity. I, myself, had not heard that song until it was covered on GLEE.

Wasn't Glee sold from the start as a show choir doing, mainly, pop tunes? I remember the gimmick as talked about in TV preview articles was always that it would be a musical using established pop songs--Broadway songs were never mentioned in the concept.

Despite the ratings dip, Glee continues to be the highest rated scripted show on FOX, so I can see it sticking around for quite sometime depending on how they work out things. I think they've done a pretty great job this season with the balance of things, and everything is on a much better par than last season, which was an utter disaster.

As someone stated - season one was fantastic, and season two had moments, but season three was beyond awful. I'm very much liking this season, and unlike last year, I'm pretty invested. As for the lack of showtunes, the show came into the public spectrum with a Journey cover, and while they've done several showtunes over the past seasons [ie: the atrocious West Side Story production last year, Rose's Turn, Take Me or Leave Me, etc] the show was born on a pop tune, so it's not surprising that they've stuck with what sells and does well.

Yes, they spent most of last season more concerned with what indie song they could turn into the next big thing rather than any and all character development or process, but I think the sparring use of showtunes has been nice, because a lot of the ones they've done [ie: West Side Story being butchered] were pretty painful. I will however admit that I think they nailed some of them - Grease was fun, Rose's Turn, Don't Rain on My Parade and mashing up I Feel Pretty with TLC's Unpretty were highlights.

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Updated On: 12/5/12 at 04:43 AM