Ryan Murphy Has No Idea What He's Doing

Yup, I said it.  Glee creator Ryan Murphy has absolutely no idea what he's doing.  


I was a big fan of Glee when it premiered.  I enjoyed it well into the first season.  And then it started to suck.  Bad.  Plot lines were inconsistent, or were dropped altogther.  Character's personality traits are rarely consistent. 


One of my major beefs from season one was that Rachel (played by the wildly talented Lea Michelle) was always talking about lawyering up, but then when she is assaulted (more or less) by a group of students from another school, she doesn't say anything.


Another more recent plot hole I picked up on was in an episode that aired last month.  Kurt claims to be the only out gay person in town.  Wait, what?  I thought Rachel had two gay dads?  Who is writing this thing?  Why is there no consistency in this show?  Why won't anyone listen to me when I'm right? 


Turns out the reason there's so much inconsistency in Glee is because it's written by the show's three creators-Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan-and each of them have competing ideas about what Glee should be.  Murphy is more interesting in making the show a dark funhouse mirror version of his experiences in high school.  Brennan wants to focus on the sadness that is at the show's core.  And Falchuk is interested in bringing the two ideas together.  


This could be an explanation as to why it seems that the characters all suffer from multiple personality disorder and why so many plot-holes and inconsistencies exist.  


I demand they fix it and I demand that they take my advice on the matter.  The best solution is for all three of them to give up and let Dreamgirls director Bill Condon take charge of Glee's future.  After all, Dreamgirls is not only a near perfect movie-musical, it's a near perfect movie.  Condon clearly understood what he was doing and deftly demonstrated how movie musicals should be made.  


In Dreamgirls the songs grow out of the situations and out of the dialog, like they're supposed to in musicals.  But not in Glee.  In Glee they go through painstaking measures to give an explanation for every single song.  Mr. Shu has to give assignments.  Rachel has to first tell the class she's sorry and then tell them that the only way she can express how sorry she is is through song.


You're killing me!  Just let the songs grow out out of the situations naturally.  That would be the first best step in fixing Glee. 


The next step would be getting rid of the "theme episodes."  Another thing about musicals is that they can be thematic without having their themes being blatantly blurted out.  West Side Story is a fantastic example of this.  The musical never comes right out and says "gang violence is bad!  Prejudice and bigotry is bad!  Hope for the future can reside with the youth if they can overcome these problems!"  Glee, however, laboriously lectures its audience instead of letting the themes subtly arise through the show's structure and storytelling.  


Well, that's my take.  Hopefully this ends up in the hands of Ryan Murphy and he'll take my advice, because he'd be stupid not to.