I’m sure many of you have heard about the smash American TV series Glee which has been advertised over here for going on 6 weeks almost none-stop and for anyone who trolls the download scene for this kind of thing, even longer.

Being a man I’m not one to go out there and openly state that I love musicals, mainly because I don’t, but I do like good musicals, and those aren’t as common as you might think because in recent years I can think of only 3 or 4 that I’d recommend to other people, those being the fantastic ‘Dreamgirls’ with Beyonce, which earned an Oscar for debutant and former American Idol contestant Jennifer Hudson. The Disney hit ‘Enchanted’ with the amazing Amy Adams (who I’m totally in love with.) ‘Hairspray’, the movie of the broadway hit featuring Queen Latifah, Christopher Walken, John Travolta, Zac Efron et al and lastly, ‘Moulin Rouge’, which let’s be honest, isn’t really something you could class as a ‘recent movie.’

Glee however attempts to cross the boundary between TV series and musical in a more adult oriented ‘High School Musical’ kind of way featuring a cast of people most people won’t recognize bar perhaps the side-splittingly funny Jane Lynch who we saw in Julie & Julia, Role Models and in Two and a Half Men as the psychiatrist.
Opting to go with an unknown cast can only be described as a master-stroke, allowing the audience to take in these characters and have them develop into their roles allows us to live vicariously through their characters and experience their situations. Glee isn’t a show with two defined leads and a support, there’s much, much more than that, there are of course those who are more important in regards to the story arc, but every one of the 12 characters has a big role to play in the development of that.

If you do like catchy musicals then you could do a lot worse than Glee. I’ve often found my foot tapping at the musical numbers and spent days with the tunes rattling around my head. What’s more, the show is actually really quite funny and delivers quite consistently across all its characters, none of whom I despise outside of the intent of the writers, something I could rarely say about other shows.

As a TV series, Glee brings me back to some of my earliest childhood memories watching TV, catching re-runs of Fame and Happy Days where the characters were always so damn happy. It makes a change to see a show that isn’t following in the footsteps of so many others these days that depend on bad language, violence and drama, I just hope that it doesn’t follow in the footsteps of Happy Days and, as that show coined the phrase, Jump the Shark, and sticks to its good natured roots.