PostBourgie blogger, and good friend Shani-O has a great post up on that site about the differences in tone and approach between Glee and Community. She comes down on the side of Community both because of its more generous tone and more progressive approach to racial types. And the thing is, I don't really disagree with her on her evaluation of the shows, both of which I'm watching avidly.
I just like the tartness of Glee: the New Directions singers feel like my own personal Sour Patch kids. Maybe this is just me, but I don't really remember any of high school as sweet or uplifting. I may not have gotten myself pregnant by a guy not my boyfriend and arranged to give the baby up to the super-scary wife of my glee club coach, but then, I wasn't a cheerleader, and my debate coach could not have been further from married. I may not have given my panties to a nerdy blogger as a blackmail payment, but I don't think anyone in my high school thought I fetishworthy (for which I am retrospectively super-grateful). But I remember high school as a series of compromises between unpleasant options that I had to make in order to get some place where I could actually spend time on figuring out who I wanted to be, what I wanted to be good at, and who I wanted to be friends with.
Glee is true to that. If anything, I think it's sweeter than my high school experience was. When people are desperate, they tend to make compromises that allow for more leeway. The gay kid can join the football team. The football stud and his cheerleader girlfriend can join the glee club--and in fact find actual sanctuary there. Those are more porous borders than any I encountered outside of senior-year physics, where we were all--including our teacher--desperate to get out of dodge. Glee understands that bitterness, and amps it up with an additional 7 or 8 years of technology and college panic. And I appreciate that. The show may be stereotyped, but in a lot of ways, it's more realistic--and perhaps even honest--than Community, which trends significantly more surreal, and obscures some of the genuine academic and economic deficiencies quite a few community college students face. I don't want full-on social realism, mind you, especially not if it means giving up hyper mashups and the rantings of an Asian Spanish teacher. But something in Glee resonates with me. What that says about my high school experience, I'm not quite sure.
Also, Andrew Gensler's great, great blog post on The Moment placing Glee (and the soundtrack to Where the Wild Things Are) in the context of historical use of children's voices in popular music is a fascinating must-read.