Hey, Zooey Deschanel. Hey. I’m sorry I used to hate you.

“Don’t sweat it Georgia, I used to hate you too!”

I don’t hate Zooey Deschanel anymore. All the complaints I used to have about her sound really stupid now. Like, “Argh, why are her eyes so big?” “Why is her hair so shiny?” “Who designed that outfit, some kind of really smart, hip person with a lot of money?!” The tone of bitterness that crept into my voice when I was hating on Zooey Deschanel aged me terribly. It was totally pointless.

I guess there were two things making me hate Zooey Deschanel. One was, obviously, jealousy. Duh! She is super pretty and well dressed! And she sings really nicely, and she is over a hundred times more professionally successful than me. This filled me with rage. The other thing was that I resented her child-like persona- it’s girly and non-threatening, and I thought it was bad for women to be represented on TV by child-women.

I feel calmer about Zooey Deschanel now. I mean, it’s her job to be super pretty and well dressed. If that was my job, I would be too. I don’t get annoyed at Justin Timberlake for wearing expensive suits, or at zookeepers for wearing overalls. They need those things, because without them they would not be well equipped to do their jobs. Zooey Deschanel’s job is being a really pretty, well-dressed musician and comic actor. What did I want her to do, put a bag over her head and borrow some overalls to wear from a zookeeper? She’d probably still look really awesome, causing me further distress!

I also found it in myself to suppress my hatred of Zooey Deschanel enough to watch New Girl. It’s actually pretty funny! Deschanel is a really good physical comedian, and the character she plays is a surprising combination of twee and foul-mouthed. So she is child-like, but in a really ambiguous way. It’s interesting. She’s not as cool as Leslie Knope, but she is way cooler than the pitifully characterised, super boring women you see in most sitcoms.

In overcoming my hatred of Zooey Deschanel, I have learned that there is more than one way to be rad, and that criticising women because they are successful, and good at looking good and making people like them, is a total waste of feminist zeal. So thank you, Zooey Deschanel. Sorry, and thank you.

Britney Spears is kind of an amazing figure. She was on telly at 11, awesomely famous at 15, the media were voraciously speculating on whether or not she was a virgin when she was 16 or 17- something that never really happened to her boyfriend Justin Timberlake- and she had a breakdown in plain sight in her early twenties. From ‘Everytime’ onwards, her songs and videos are immensely preoccupied with what it is to be a female celebrity, to be constantly followed and photographed, to be harassed, and to be unable to escape your own perceived failings. She is extremely successful but receives very little respect.

I think the media keep more of a respectful distance from male stars. Think of the upskirt shots pararazzi take of female stars getting out of cars- nothing says “you are barely human” like a man lying in the street jostling with others to get a photo of your vagina, to sell. Weight gain, fast food, bare feet, “bad” parenting, romantic mistakes, lacklustre dancing, showing her age, wearing a wig, drinking a lot of soda- I know everything Britney Spears does, and I’m not even trying that hard. What must her life be like?

Spears says the famous breakdown was caused by exhaustion, depression and alcohol- it doesn’t sound funny. But there are still people who think it’s pretty frickin’ funny. Because Britney Spears is a famous woman, and her life is ours. Here’s Sarah Silverman making jokes about Spears’s breakdown, vagina and children, and calling her slutty, after she had just come off stage at the 2007 VMAs. This was the infamous comeback performance of ‘Gimme More’, during which Spears looked tired and confused. To read the vitriol printed about it afterwards you’d think she’d slaughtered Diana Ross live on stage. But she hadn’t- she just looks tired and, y’know, confused.

This performance is parodied in the latest episode of Glee, during which Brittany S. Pierce re-enacts the real Britney’s downward spiral, including the hair incident and fights with paparazzi. There aren’t any videos of this performance of ‘Gimme More’, but here is a still of her miming through a mouthful of cheetos.

This is taking the piss out of a few things- the junk food Spears is always chastised for eating (as well as a large bag of cheetos she comes on stage with about four litres of orange soda), her bad dancing and addled mental state. So it’s attacking her for eating cheap food, being older than she was before, and being in a bad place. She should look sexy, but she looks messy and ugly, and so she deserves scorn. On Glee, only bad people and Sue Sylvester are mean. But the show itself, independent of its characters, can be a real bully. This is a rare example of the show’s humour aiming downwards, at an easy and vulnerable target. Taking the piss out of 2007 Britney Spears isn’t funny- it’s desperate and horrible, and skates near ableism, classism and sexism.

I think the best way to approach ‘troubled’ female celebrities is to make an effort not to care. Ethical non-caring. From now on, I don’t care what Britney Spears does, or Mischa Barton, or Lindsay Lohan, or Amanda Bynes. If she records a new album, great! If it’s bad, I don’t care. If she crashes her car, I don’t care. If she has relationship trouble or eats some food- don’t care. For her many years of tireless service to pop music, Britney Spears has earned our quiet support, and also our indifference.

I know more than one dude who loves telling people that he has never heard anything by Beyoncé, or seen any Richard Curtis movies. I’m not a snob, says the dude, I just have taste, why would I expose myself to that capitalist bilge, bla bla bla says the dude, I’m a jerk and I only like Shostakovich and lengthly folk ballads about wayward women. These dudes probably see it as pure coincidence that they mostly just like art by men. If art by women was better, they’d like that too!

I know why jerks want you to know that they don’t care about Beyoncé. Beyoncé must be one of the most influential women in the world, but her power comes from her dominion over popular culture, and as such it’s easy for culturally elitist dudes to dismiss her and everything she does. As if popular culture doesn’t matter! Beyoncé is a hitherto unheard of level of famous- if she wanted to, I bet she could be President. But her music, and her movies, are mostly enjoyed by women, so jerks don’t take her seriously.

There are legitimate reasons to be circumspect about culture aimed at women. It shapes us in ways that are often seriously negative. Women’s magazines are a perfect example- because they are written and read almost exclusively by women, they have potential to be really subversive and unifying and great for women, but they are not, they just make you ashamed that you are not thinner, wealthier, less hairy, more famous and in possession of more beautiful things. The same goes, kind of, for romantic comedies, which are made for women but often written and directed by men, and put fulfilment through hetero romance on a pedestal. A woman may have a job, friends, family and interests, but the narrative is structured around her meeting and ensnaring a good man, and once that has happened she is complete and the film is over. But the problem is, as a woman, you spend the early years of your life being told that you have to watch these things and read these things, because they are for you; and then at some point you are informed that these things are crap and you have been misled and you have no taste. What are we supposed to do?

I suggest…watch The Mindy Project! The Mindy Project, written by and starring Mindy Kaling, is a kind of wonky take on the romantic comedy – it’s not a jerk, but it doesn’t just uncritically replicate the conventions of the genre. The pilot aired in America last week, and I recommend it enthusiastically, it’s super funny and very endearing. Kaling plays Mindy, a doctor in her early 30s looking for love and trying to get her life on track. She knows what it looks like when you find love and your life is on track because she has seen it in romantic comedies- the episode’s first scenes are of Mindy as a child, teenager and adult staring at a TV, chanting long-memorised movie lines along with Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts. The child-Mindy gets the best line, gleefully chiming, “I’ll have what she’s having!”

How cute?

The whole situation borrows a little from Bridget Jones’s Diary- a woman in her early 30s resolves to change her life before it’s too late and she dies alone and is discovered weeks later half-eaten by alsatians. But on The Mindy Project this generic narrative of personal transformation is done with great wit and self-awareness, and is mediated through elements of popular culture. Kaling writes her character’s desire for transformation as very earnest but also pretty delusional- she cycles drunk through suburban streets shouting to herself, “I’m Sandra Bullock!”. She tells two potential patients, a non-English speaking woman with no health insurance and her nephew, that she can’t take them on as patients because she’s at a time in her life when she can only do things that represent progress and development, like spinning. She has casual sex with a handsome British doctor- but is he Hugh Grant in About a Boy, or Hugh Grant in real life?

I think it’s great that Kaling didn’t write her heroine as someone who is slightly flawed but under her glasses, unfashionable clothes or prickly demeanour the picture of ideal womanhood, like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. Mindy is accomplished and successful, but she’s also a mess, excruciatingly self-absorbed and honestly kind of annoying. She does good things, like leaving a date and running to the hospital to deliver a baby to an uninsured migrant, and she does less good things, like giving a nasty speech at her ex-boyfriend’s wedding and then cycling drunkenly into a swimming pool. That is what puts the romantic comedy vibe all askew- Mindy is very, very far from being Sandra Bullock.

I really liked the pilot of The Mindy Project because it valorises culture that is often denigrated because it is for women (or maybe sometimes because it is bad…), but irreverently and with a slightly critical eye. Mindy loves romance and wants her life to be a romantic comedy, and much of the comedy stems from the vast gulf between the world of the Richard Curtis movie and the world that we actually have to live in. Kaling writes great jokes, and the show has a lot of promising minor characters. It’s not revolutionary, and has some slightly uncomfortable bits, but it is breezy and enjoyable, and quite flashy and well put together, especially for a pilot. This must have something to do with an extremely conspicuous product placement deal with Apple- Mindy spends the whole episode with an iPhone in her hand, but it’s used to quite good effect.

Mindy’s date no-nos

So…don’t be a jerk! Check it out.

Wikipedia pages for former winners of The X Factor are incredible- I never knew there were so many ways of saying someone was dumped by their record label because no-one bought their music. Former X Factor contestants who continue to make music successfully are JLS, Leona Lewis, Alexandra Burke, Olly Murs and of course One Direction, who are having baffling good luck in America. It seems gratuitously cruel to name those who were unable to hold on to their fame. I really want to though. I mean, Shayne Ward.

That is not OK with me. Steve Brookstein, the first winner, is now making a living as a part-time anti-X Factor crusader, part time rape apologist. Joe McElderry’s Wikipedia page is oddly specific, informing us that he made a cameo appearance in a musical version of Dirty Dancing at the Sunderland Empire on Tuesday 25 September. It doesn’t say what year, though, because Joe McElderry’s performance in Dirty Dancing was timeless. Leon Jackson is sad that Cheryl Cole never calls him anymore. Matt Cardle “parted ways” with Simon Cowell’s record label, and is now in partnership with So What Recordings (poor choice). Ray Quinn, who is my age, “continues to perform 1950s Swing Classics around the country”. I can feel myself getting cruel now, I have to stop.

I would imagine that X Factor contestants audition for the show because they want to be big, big stars, not because they want to record one or two albums, not see a lot of the profits and get dropped when people lose interest. But X Factor‘s success rate at producing international stars is, based on twelve people in the live shows per series and four international stars produced over eight series, one in twenty four. One international star per twenty four contestants- we are, of course, counting One Direction as a single person, though in reality they are worth much less than that. Even if you win the series, the odds against you being mentioned in a Kanye West song (like Leona Lewis) or having your own line of novelty condoms (like JLS) are considerable. And say you win X Factor, it doesn’t go great for you and your career is over by the time you’re in your mid-twenties- what then? Touring the country singing swing music at weddings? Is that better than the life you would have had otherwise?

Of course, it’s really easy for me to snark. I do not dream of being a famous singer, I dream of getting someone to pay me to write about Saturday night telly. Even if auditioning for X Factor is demonstrably dicey, and might just wind up making you cry, it makes sense that people do it- in numbers that increase year on year. Provided you are a good enough singer, it is definitely the easiest way in the world of getting millions of people to look at you. Something about the ethos of X Factor ties in unsettlingly with the rhetoric of David Cameron’s government- if you want it hard enough, if you dream big enough, you can have everything you want, so don’t be weak and don’t flounder or you’re finished.

I live in a house where X Factor is watched, so I am aware of it, but I have never really thought about it much. So I decided to give an episode my proper attention. It was quite an experience. I have, of course, followed this type of show before- as a young teenager I definitely watched Popstars, Popstars: The Rivals and Pop Idol, all of which were precursors to X Factor and blueprints for its format. 2002 was a long time ago, though, and I had a few big surprises in store.

Like- terrifying thirty foot screens bearing the judges’ faces.

Women-as-décor.

Dancing women accompanied most songs- without them, the stage would seem vast and the contestant tiny. With them, the whole performance looks cheap and dated. Some of the sets and costumes were surprisingly high-concept, though these often also fall under ‘cheap and dated’- like something a Lady Gaga tribute act would perform on.

This man was given the compliment, “It was just like watching Chris Martin”. He later cried in his dressing room for a full three hours. True story. No not really.

And the dry ice! Oh, the dry ice. I was always under the impression that this type of show was cheap to make, but the set is extremely flash. Some time between when I stopped watching and today they built this terrifying colosseum which dwarfs the contestants, and bought the rights to a lot of Wagner- it’s like they’re trying to make the show interesting through sheer force of will. I also found myself wondering how much they had to pay Dermot O’Leary to do such a tedious job, year after year.

It looked to me like a show that was trying too hard, and not just with the visuals. X Factor is conceptually extremely simple: it is a talent competition, in which twelve singers compete to win a record deal. It gives itself substance through wringing personal, emotional drama out of the contestants, and thereby eliciting emotional investment from the viewer. In this sense, the show is very callous: your panic attacks, swollen vocal cords, dead grandmother or abusive father animate the show and give people something to hold on to, as do your age, your appearance, what kind of week you’ve had and how you are taking to fame- that’s what the little montages they play before performances are for. This week, one contestant was having problems with her vocal cords so she went to a doctor and was filmed having an endoscopy- these are her frickin’ tonsils:

If they just wanted a good singer, they could do it in a week. They want a good singer whom the public already know and care for and whose Christmas single they will buy, and they want to fill their schedules; that takes sixteen weeks, and a look inside them, figuratively or literally.

As for the people on the show- I like Tulisa a lot. I have been a fan for a while, since her extremely dignified and right-on reaction to her ex-boyfriend leaking a sex tape of her- she released a video saying that she had done nothing wrong, and it was the man who should be ashamed of himself for betraying her trust. She seems to be pretty invested in the people she meets on the show, she says what she thinks and she doesn’t do the showy, misleading stuff the others do for the camera- you know, “It’s not good news for you today I’m afraid…IT’S GREAT NEWS!!!”, that kind of thing. The Pussycat Dolls’ Nicole Scherzinger is the queen of that kind of thing, and also of barmy outfits and sweet overfamiliarity with contestants. She is very likeable. Gary and Louis are…fine. The judges are there to comment on the contestant’s performance; if they say anything negative, the whole audience boos loudly, which makes giving genuine feedback pretty tricky.

Unfortunately, none of the contestants really grabbed me. There are two acts who you’d describe as not ‘typical’ for the show, in the sense that they play acoustic guitars and have slightly mannered regional accents: Lucy Spraggan, who would like to sound like Billy Bragg and took the unnecessary step of writing her own lyrics to a Florence and the Machine song; and James Arthur, who has LIFE tattooed on his knuckles. Maybe it’s good to have a diversity of styles of music on the show, but I can’t help thinking- if they do win, they probably won’t like what they have to do afterwards. There is one guy, Rylan Clark, who is bad at singing and is hanging on in there due to the British public’s well-documented good will towards people who aren’t that good at what they do. There are three groups, including two incredibly dispiriting One Direction-style teen boybands who as far as I can tell were thrown together during the audition process. They perform like the members have never met, or like they did meet once and something awful happened, and they now share a terrible, shameful secret. Everyone’s favourite, according to my sister, is Ella Henderson- she is 16, she is a great singer, but the square in my head wants her to stay in school and try again when she is a bit older.

Around when I was thinking, “Ooh that nice young girl should stay in school!”, I knew the show was not for me. I just did not feel at all excited, by any of it. The most exciting thing on screen was Nicole Scherzinger’s weird hair. It’s a trueism now that X Factor isn’t about music, it’s about TV. I don’t know what I think about that. To listen to any of the limp first singles by any of the winners, which are usually called something like “My Climb To The Top of the Mountain of Success Was Only Possible Because Your Love Makes Me Fly” and sound like they are written by committees of ITV researchers, you’d think X Factor was devised by TV executives who hated not only music but also people. Thing is, if the music is uninspiring, as TV it is fundamentally boring, and relies totally on the viewer starting to root for someone, or loving the music, the bright lights and the tension. And it is surely clear by now that I am too grumpy for any of that. I hate the dancing women. I think Louis Walsh is irrelevant- since when was managing Westlife a positive in someone’s employment history? I worry that the contestants will regret X Factor, that it will do bad things for them. I think the whole process must be really stressful and scary. And another pop culture phenomenon evades me forever.

Pals, TV lovers, fans of justice and equality, I strongly advise you against watching the latest episode of Misfits, episode 2 of series 4.

The episode’s main plot has to do with new character Finn, who has his girlfriend Sadie tied up and gagged in his flat to stop her from using her power on him- the power to control his behaviour. My deep discomfort with the episode had to do equally with the notion of this woman being held captive for her own good and the good of others, and the characterisation of her as a castrating banshee. Finn gives a misogynist diatribe half way through the episode to explain himself to the other characters, and I have carefully transcribed it for you all using my own superpower, rage-induced computerised telekenesis:

“I know it looks bad, keeping someone prisoner like that and tying them up and making them shit in a bucket. But it’s not what you think- she’s my girlfriend. She’s got a power. She can make me into a perfect boyfriend. Whatever she said, whatever she told me to do, I did it. I stopped drinking. I stopped going out with my mates. All I cared about was making her happy. Endless presents and flowers and pampering… the conversations, we had to discuss everything, my jaw physically ached from all the talking. That and the hours of cunnilingus. I practically lived with my face between her thighs. Some days I felt like I didn’t see the sun. A few weeks ago she went to Ibiza with her friends, leaving me to deep clean the flat. With her being away her hold over me faded and I realised what she was doing- and I did the only thing I could do. I tied her up and gagged her, to stop her using her power.” 

I know. It’s so horrible. This superpower that she has is so obviously gendered- she’s a classic sexist stereotype, the shrill, domineering woman, only she was bitten by a radioactive spider. She’s like a turbocharged Amy Pond. The writers adapted the plot of this episode from a comic book written by an angry and romantically unsuccessful man during his toilet breaks. It’s called My Nagging Wife Made Me Hoover So I Fucking Killed Her. The last two sentences are not true.

I felt a slight sense of relief when Sadie is untied and appears to be quite a normal person with reasonable expectations of Finn; I thought the episode might turn a corner and focus on Finn being a misogynist jerk who had his girlfriend tied up for no reason. That’s not how it went, though- back on the loose, Sadie turns back into a sexist caricature of the girlfriend from hell, supermanipulating Finn into buying her flowers and going down on her. Turns out, he was right to have her bound and gagged for all those weeks! She’s a nightmare! These are the conclusions reached by Finn’s new friends at the community centre- at first they were maybe a bit perturbed by the kidnap, but once they realised how awful his girlfriend was they had nothing but sympathy. The phrase pussy-whipped was used a lot. Like, a lot a lot.

As the only steady female character in a show whose humour now seems to rely heavily on rape jokes, new kid Jess has a lot of weight to carry in offsetting the hilarious (not hilarious) and deliberate sexism of the other characters. Unfortunately this means that she doesn’t get to do anything else- instead of having fun and going on capers like the rest of them, she just stands forlornly at the back of scenes, pointing out that other people are being sexist. She’s basically me.

With Lauren Socha (Kelly) and Antonia Thomas (Alisha) gone, the show has lost two tough, cool women and replaced them with, well, nothing.I used to really enjoy Misfits, but that will be the last time I watch it.

i made this image with the help of my rage-induced computerised telekenesis

While you’re reading this you might want to listen to ‘Money (That’s What I Want)’ by Barrett Strong. Totally your call though.

My favourite film is Howard Hawks’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. I think that despite coming the Hollywood studio system, which likes money more than women, it is, intentionally or not, a film which loves women, and thinks money is a joke. It stars Marilyn Monroe as Lorelei Lee, your classic “gold digger”, who will slow dance with the oldest, most lecherous man on the boat if he looks like he’s got some money. Always there to roll her eyes is her best friend and closest confidante Dorothy (Jane Russell), who, to Lorelei’s frustration, doesn’t care about money and is only interested in sex. They are endlessly supportive and affectionate towards one another, and even the film’s very last scene, a double wedding, focuses more the bond between the two friends than the two truly unconvincing heterosexual romantic partnerships which the scene technically solidifies.

Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is said to be the film which established Monroe as a “dumb blonde”, which I personally find strange because Lorelei is not dumb- she knows exactly what she’s doing. When accused of being stupid by her fiancé’s snobby father, she responds, “I can be smart when it’s important- but most men don’t like it”. Lorelei’s voracious materialism and dumb blonde act are quite clearly part of a survival strategy, and nowhere is this clearer than in the iconic number ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’, which she performs late in the movie after she and Dorothy have been left penniless and alone in France by a man whom they had trusted to support them.

Here is a link to a video of the number, which cannot be embedded.

It is interesting to compare this song and performance with Madonna’s ‘Material Girl’ and its video. In lovely full-on pastiche mode Madonna borrows the pink gown, the staging and the army of rich suitors from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, but the similarities between the two numbers prove to be extremely superficial. ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’ isn’t only about diamonds, it’s about how risky it is to be a woman in a society in which forces women to depend economically on men. The speaker in the lyric loves diamonds because, unlike a kiss, a man’s affection, and your beauty, diamonds are tangible and valuable, and they last forever. She worries about paying rent and being able to afford food, and she knows that when she gets old and unattractive men will stop helping her. The diamonds are not loved for what they are- expensive and beautiful objects, paradigmatic of wealth and power- but what they can do- ensure that you can keep on living when men abandon you. I find the song anxious, morbid and sadly pragmatic.

‘Material Girl’ is different. It bounces with confidence. Madonna’s lyrics speak of an uncomplicated joy in money for its own sake which I think is totally missing from the lyrics of ‘Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend’. Being able to get money from men, and reject those who can’t offer money, is a happy victory in the battle of the sexes- very 80s, I think- not a matter of life and death. Madonna smiles as she takes money from the male dancers’ pockets and pulls rings off their fingers, and they don’t mind. The video also misses one of the really interesting parts of the Monroe performance- the verses she sings to a crowd of younger women. In a film which is so preoccupied with female friendship and mutual support between women, Lorelai sings conspiratorially to these other women:

He’s your guy when stocks are high,

But beware when they start to descend

It’s then that those louses go back to their spouses

Diamonds are a girl’s best friend.

She teaches these eager young girls survival skills to use in their future dealings with unscrupulous married men. While Madonna speaks from a very individualistic perspective- “I am a material girl”- Lorelai Lee speaks in generalities- “Diamonds are a girl’s best friend”- and shares her hard-earned knowledge with the girls on stage, and the women in the cinema. Men come off very badly in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, from lecherous diamond dealer Piggy to credulous wet blanket Mr Esmond, and the real driving force behind the film is the unshakable friendship between the two female leads, who help each other to survive in a hostile world.

How to Marry a Millionaire, another Monroe comedy from 1953, has a comparable premise- three low-waged but respectable gals team up to rent a huge apartment, and use it to try and snare a millionaire each. The film, however, is almost unwatchable, as the bond between its female characters collapses and its focus ultimately shifts to the men they are trying to marry. The disappointment I felt watching How to Marry a Millionaire helped me to realise how extraordinary Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is. The former comes off as an uninteresting product of capitalist Hollywood, and its reverence for money and marriage is humourless and straightforward, whereas the latter treats Lorelai’s obsession with money as a result of her being young woman with no education living on her wits in 1953, and her desire to marry as a ruse.

The spirit of Lorelei Lee is alive and well in modern pop music, and freedom from male control is mostly framed in terms of having access to money; in place of marrying a millionaire, the goal is to become one. In ‘Irreplaceable’, it seems that Beyoncé is able to gleefully dismiss her unfaithful boyfriend largely because she is not dependent on him financially. In the video, she’s chucking him and his scruffy boxes of unimportant stuff out of her enormous mansion. How was he untrue? “Rolling her around in a car that I bought you”. What is the final indignity for the ex-boyfriend? The car is hers, and he has to leave in a taxi. Her attitude is a mix of the Madonna attitude and the Lorelei Lee attitude- money is both desirable for its own sake, because it makes you beautiful and buys you nice things, and expedient, because it allows you to choose which men you involve yourself with. This is the case with a number of Beyoncé-penned songs, from ‘Independent Women’ to ‘Countdown’.

In the documentary the ever-humble Beyoncé has made about her own life and how brilliant it is, she says:

“You know, equality is a myth, and for some reason, everyone accepts the fact that women don’t make as much money as men do…I truly believe that women should be financially independent from their men. And let’s face it, money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define value. They define what’s sexy. And men define what’s feminine. It’s ridiculous.”

I read this in an interview Beyoncé did with GQ. The interview is about how Beyoncé is independent, in control of her career and culturally powerful, and the photos accompanying the interview are pretty demeaning. Hadley Freeman in The Guardian childishly criticises Bey herself for letting the side down, talking about equality in her pants, but the way I see it the interview and the photos are not dissonant, they are a perfect fit. Beyoncé braves being laughed at by a male-dominated cultural world to tell us what she has learned during her long career- that men are powerful because they own money and businesses, and our cultural standards were created by men- and her point is proven by the sexual photographs she had to be in to earn the space in a men’s magazine. As wealthy, as in control as she is, Beyoncé can’t have the career she wants without using her body as a selling point, and this is not something to criticise her for but something we can learn from.

Under capitalism and patriarchy it is super obvious that your survival and fulfilment as a woman should be tangled up with money, and that taking money and power from men, by being a rich man’s wife or an audacious female capitalist millionaire, should be seen as the best mode of liberation from gendered poverty. In this interesting article, Emma-Rose Cornwall writes about finding out that most of her possessions are uninsurable, essentially valueless. Most advertising aimed at women sells things that are used to make a woman’s body more desirable -valuable, even- but which themselves have no resale value. Mascara might make you look more like you should, but a used tube of mascara cannot be sold for money. Cosmetics, gym memberships, jewellery and clothes add value to a female body by making it more acceptable to men and sexist culture, but these, unless they are extremely expensive like Lorelei’s diamonds, are not assets in the same way as a car or a house. Instead, your body becomes the asset, in which you invest and from which you expect a return. This is obviously a risky place to store your wealth. I am not suggesting, of course, that women don’t own houses and cars- they obviously do. But they also make up the majority of low-paid and unpaid workers, are often in more precarious or part-time employment because of caring responsibilities, still often depend on a male breadwinner and nonetheless invest vastly more than men of what they do earn in the aforementioned physical acceptability-boosting items.

Instead of shying away from this stubborn facet of gender inequality, culture aimed at women appears to have embraced it. I am thinking particularly of Sex and the City and Carrie Bradshaw, a woman who seems to only buy shoes, lunch and cigarettes. In one episode Carrie has a crisis, realising that she doesn’t have enough money for a down-payment to save her flat but has spent tens of thousands of dollars on clothes and shoes, things which she can’t easily resell. Over one of their expensive power-lunches she jokes to her friends, “I have spent $40,000 on shoes, and I have no place to live. I will literally be the old woman who lived in her shoes!” The women of Sex and the City were surely intended to be a model of modern, independent women, and they terrify me, with their extreme post-feminism, their smiling complicity with lucrative, embarrassing product placement deals and their Chinese mail-order babies. They talk about sex a lot, but it’s all in the spirit of sifting through all the different types of men, looking for Mr Perfect. If that is what emancipation looks like…yeesh, I don’t want it.

I think pop culture by women could move away from Carrie Bradshaw-style liberation and slowly disentangle independence from money, success from proximity to the board room, and salvation from marriage, by focusing on community, friendship and inter-reliance between women. Recent TV shows written by women such as The Mindy Project, Girls and New Girl, while they are definitely not the angry, radical and totally unmarketable sitcoms I dream of watching, do feature female characters who have affectionate and interesting relationships with one another, and who enjoy things other than men- things like nudity, delivering babies, being a primary school teacher, writing novelty songs, getting married as a drunk joke, and so on. Also an honourable mention to Ann Perkins and Leslie Knope of Parks and Recreation, who are obviously soulmates.

The warm, delighted feeling I feel when I watch Gentlemen Prefer Blondes comes from watching Dorothy and Lorelei being a team. If I were a writer, I would write a beautiful sitcom about being a team, in which you don’t have to be rich if you don’t want to, and there are better ways of not needing men than being able to buy your own car. The point would not be total independence, like being able to survive without any help, which is not necessarily a desirable goal, but a good kind of interdependence, in which the well-being of the team is more important than the material success of the individual. As individuals we obviously can’t ignore money, and shouldn’t ignore economic inequality, and as women it is hard to ignore the imperative to use our money to make our bodies more desirable; but our culture could leave these things in the background instead of using wealth and beauty as the ultimate measures of a woman’s independence and success. And that…is what I want.

One of maybe two parallels between Don Draper and The First Evil is that Don Draper never seems to touch anything, and nor do any of his male colleagues. Wealthy white women birth their babies and make their dinner, poorer white women type out their letters and connect their calls, black women look after their children and keep their houses in order, and black men push the buttons in the lift for them. With all those real world impediments taken care of by other people they just glide along, having a much better time than anyone else.

You can tell that Don Draper is not literally incorporeal because he touches drinks, cigarettes and women. And sometimes the phone. I spent five years not watching Mad Men because I thought it was probably really sexist. Watching it I found that as much as it is a show about wealthy white men drinking in meetings and cheating on their wives, it is equally a show about women. Mad Men is immensely preoccupied with certain aspects of women’s struggles- most obviously integration into the world of work but also various forms of transactional sex and, from a limited perspective, sexual violence.

The most interesting and productive moments in Mad Men, for me, come when its desire to give a somewhat truthful account of what it was to be a woman in the 60s clashes badly with what critics seem to admire most about the show, its carefully stylised and seemingly affectionate portrayal of the all-powerful white married male who can have whatever he wants. The show’s dual fascination for the glamorous lifestyle of the male advertising executive and for the constant, gritty struggle of female wives, secretaries and professionals make a strange mix that gives a lot to think about. What I’m going to do here is look at Mad Men through four of its women- Betty, the unhappy housewife and Carla, her maid; Peggy, who gets ahead mostly using her brains and Joan, who mostly uses her sexuality- and Don Draper, the show’s main character and in my opinion one of its greatest weaknesses.

Betty and Carla

The unhappiness of Betty Draper as a housewife and mother works as a fairly facile critique of what was once the pervading model of female happiness, the happy housewife. Mad Men‘s writers had a great time showing Betty Draper crumbling under the pressure of being a perfect wife and mother, going out into her neat suburban garden with a gun and firing at her neighbour’s pet birds.

Best. Cry for help. Ever.

After the first two seasons I was like- I get it. She’s unhappy. You have grasped one of the basic feminist arguments, that being a housewife isn’t fun. The characterisation of Betty draws equally on the fantasy figure of the perfect, happy housewife, who is beautiful, loves her home and buys what Don Draper’s agency advertises, and the corresponding figure of the unhappy housewife. I believe the viewer is supposed to enjoy both.

Sara Ahmed writes in The Promise of Happiness, which I love and heartily recommend, that certain objects, states and identities come to us already invested with the idea of happiness or the promise that they will make us happy. A clear example, and one on which Ahmed dwells, is marriage. The supposed innate happiness of the state of marriage is endlessly reaffirmed by culture, politics and popular psychology, such that it is hard to imagine a happy, well-lived life without marriage. This conception of what makes people happy orients us through what we see as life’s stages, from childhood to marriage to babies to whatever to death. To reject this scheme of happiness as a feminist, a queer person or just a general sourpuss, is often to be seen by others as a source of unhappiness or a killjoy.

Ahmed discusses the figure of the happy housewife, and the control this cultural trope exercises over who is seen to be close to or entitled to happiness. The happy, or indeed the unhappy housewife in the popular imagination and in Mad Men is a white woman from a privileged background who pursued her own, respectable interests until she got married and dedicated herself to her husband, children and home. This is certainly the case with Betty, who went to a women’s college, did a bit of modelling and then settled down with Don. The happiness afforded to the housewife is obviously illusory, and insistence that this is a happy state hides a multitude of unhappy realities like a narrowing of intellectual and social possibilities, unpaid domestic labour, and spousal rape.

However, if the figure of the happy housewife is a fantasy, some women are closer than others to the fantasy, which at least comes with social respectability and probably some degree of economic security. Feminist critiques of the imperative to marry and settle down wilfully ignored poor women and women of colour, many of whom were not housewives because they were already in the workforce through necessity. It is not necessarily happiness that is unequally distributed between rich and poor women, but proximity to the fantasy of happiness. Ahmed writes that “what is unequally distributed is the feeling that you have what should make you happy, a distribution of the promise of a feeling…rather than the distribution of happiness.”

The way Mad Men uses the fantasy of the happy housewife is interesting. Betty’s role as a housewife is a source of unhappiness for her, but the fantasy, the happy surface, is also highly aestheticised and made appealing to the viewer. Mad Men‘s meticulous styling creates a visually pleasurable fantasy of the beautiful, wealthy, devoted housewife, a good consumer, and the large home in a monocultural suburb, which the viewer can enjoy while smirking about how outdated it is and how much better things are now. Carla, the Drapers’ black maid, fits into the Betty fantasy as a prop, but as a character she is so far from the fantasy of the happy housewife that the viewer of Mad Men is not encouraged to wonder whether or not she is happy. She is in many episodes, with few lines, and we know little about her. When Betty arbitrarily fires her in Season 4 we may feel outrage or sadness for her, but in the grand scheme of things her disappearance from the show barely registers- but it does allow Don to take Megan to California, fall in love and propose to her.

Don’t worry about it guys she only raised your kids for years and years

I recently watched Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life, a film about a white single mother, Laura, who dreams of making it as an actress, and a black woman, Annie, whom Laura takes in and exploits as a domestic labourer and companion for many years until Annie dies. This film from 1959 succeeds as a critique of the exploitative relationship between a white woman and her black maid in a way that Mad Men absolutely does not. Ahmed writes that some women, women like Carla, are seen to be “lacking the very qualities and attributes that would make a life good”. Because of her race and economic status, Carla is so far from the cultural ideas about happiness with which the show is so preoccupied that she is seen as being unentitled to happiness and unentitled to our caring about her happiness. Her lack of weight in the show suggests an unwillingness on the part of the show’s writers to explore the life of someone whose existence cannot easily be made glamorous. She is uncritically backgrounded, and eventually uncritically ditched. Meanwhile Betty is shipped from one stifling marriage to another so that the viewer can continue to enjoy the cautionary spectacle of the unhappy housewife.

Peggy and Joan

There are two rapes in Mad Men that are depicted as rapes in a straightforward way. In Season 2 Joan is punished for her sexual activity with men at the office with rape by her fiancé, at the office; and in Season 3 Pete Campbell the spineless, greedy dweeb, rapes his neighbours’ au pair, figuring that she owes him sex because he got her a dress. The show also allows for a surprising amount of grey area between rape and sex, rarely shying away from the coercive or transactional nature of ‘consensual’ sex in a setting in which men always hold power over women as their providers or employers. Joan Holloway, who is presented as having a great understanding of workplace sexual politics, intimates to Peggy on her first day at work that sleeping with her superiors is part of her job, and when Peggy does subsequently sleep with Pete Campbell the slimy, entitled toad, there is no doubt that she is doing so out of obligation, not desire. The pregnancy which devastates her and has many long-term consequences for her was, to me, a really moving element of the plot, approached with compassion- it shows us that hard, horrible things happen to women in a patriarchy.

The world of Mad Men is one in which the idea of a woman freely choosing to have sex doesn’t make a lot of sense, because having sex with men is so highly incentivised, and not having sex with men is punished by disdain and disfavour at work. It is pleasing to see Peggy able to claw back some sexual agency after the trials she goes through in Season 1, and she does this by asserting herself as someone smart and respectable who will not be persuaded, from a more authoritative position as the firm’s first female copywriter. There is a sense that by climbing the ladder at work, by being able to move from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and so on, Peggy escapes from the duty-sex that is a fact of life for the lower-class women on the show.

Best fringe on Madison Avenue

Joan, by contrast, never successfully disentangles herself from the sexual economy of the workplace, and her body never ceases to function as a source of visual pleasure both for the males at the office and for the viewer. People talk about Christina Hendricks’s body so much that I am very reluctant to do it myself, but I believe that her diegetic function as a body that people enjoy looking at in the office, someone whose beauty is used to attract clients, and who in Season 5 is strong-armed into having sex with a potential client to secure their business, is not separable from the way Hendricks is dressed and filmed for the visual pleasure of the viewer. It is not pure objectification, because Joan is such a wonderful character whose steeliness and short temper suggest years of struggle and hard work and paying dearly for her mistakes. She is an amazing creation. But it is also true that Christina Hendricks’s body is deliberately used as part of the appealing surface on which Mad Men sells itself.

Who is being sexualised in this publicity shot? Clue: It’s not Lane Price.

I love Joan and Peggy so much that I would watch Mad Men spin-offs called Joan and Peggy every week until they got cancelled. They are not just two flat models of female success, as they could have been if Mad Men was the show I thought it was before I watched it. The ways in which they have worked their ways into positions of relative power and authority are complex, and I personally feel a far greater degree of identification and sympathy with Peggy and Joan than I ever could with Don.

Don Draper

This will sound strange, but one of the persistent flaws that I see in Mad Men is that it is too enthralled to Don Draper. It’s like the writers have really been taken in by the aura of mystery and authority they they have written around Don Draper, like clients in meetings are taken in by him. They really love him. Things got uncomfortably reverential in Season 4, and frequent, tedious scenes of Don writing in his journal and telling us his incredible thoughts in voiceover were included to show us that Don Draper is now wise and introspective, as well as handsome, smart, fantastic at his job and irresistible to the ladies.

Whatever, Don

Don Draper is supposed to be simultaneously a serial womaniser and a devoted husband and father, an alcoholic yet far more in control than any other alcoholic, thrillingly reckless yet always right. His being one thing and its opposite is not complexity or depth of character, it’s him being written as some kind of incredible 1960s advertising hero-god. And Mad Men‘s thoughtful exploration of sexual politics goes totally out the window when it comes to Don Draper. This SNL skit about Don Draper has a lot to say about the horrible ease with which he accesses women, which I don’t find very funny. The fact that he is someone’s husband or boss or paying for their drinks no longer signifies power disparity when Don Draper has sex- women just want him, always, unconditionally. When he does hurt a woman, as he hurts his secretary Allison in Season 4, the show’s focus remains on him, and the incident is incorporated into the development of his character as a mystery, someone who is wounded and struggling but well-intentioned. His unethical behaviour is intended to increase our admiration for him.

And this is one of many respects in which political and social complexities can be totally glossed over when they trouble the glamorous surface that is supposed to be one of Mad Men‘s main draws, and to which Don Draper’s infallible genius and great face are integral. I love watching Mad Men, but I hope that the second thing that Don Draper and The First Evil have in common is that they will both be vanquished by women.

If Matt Smith jumped off a cliff, would you do it too? I wouldn’t. But I guess some people would.

Geronimeeeewwww

It was this moment from ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS’ where I thought…this is a bit shit, isn’t it? They created this really unnecessary high-stakes moment that has very little payoff, with the sole aim of forcing the Doctor’s assistant to put her life in his hands, again. It’s a mandatory bonding moment from which there is no possibility of escape. It made me think – who would be an assistant? Who are these women? What would have happened if she had not wanted to jump off that cliff?

That is actually a trick question- got you!! Because trusting the Doctor, not running away from danger, and not saying no are really fundamental qualities of the assistant. They don’t write them as people who would say “I’m not jumping off that cliff”, or “It looks a bit dark in there let’s stay out here”, or “Please stop stalking me through time and space.” I thought it was time to give some thought to what the Doctor-assistant relationship is, what function the assistant has on the show, how Doctor Who distributes personal qualities by gender, and why I now hate this lovely show that I used to love.

I should say that I haven’t seen a lot of old Who. I watched one series with Tom Baker and got literally nothing out of it. Nothing.

Nothing.

This being the internet, I am clearly leaving myself open to comments to the effect that if I had seen the 1972 series ‘Birthday Party of the Daleks’ I would see that Matt Smith’s take on the Doctor actually owes a lot to zzzzzzz. I’m ready for you, the internet.

Doctor Who is structurally sexist. It is about a male hero and his female sidekick. Moreover, the hero is an alien man with great power and knowledge who takes a younger, human woman away from her home and family and frequently puts her in situations in which she is out of her depth, upset or in danger. I don’t usually think about it that way- until the last few series I mostly just thought “Great, Doctor Who is on again!!”- but that is how power is divided between the Doctor and the assistant. It really didn’t bother me until Series 5, when Matt Smith took over as the 11^th Doctor, Karen Gillen was introduced as the Doctor’s assistant, and Steven Moffat became head writer. I feel like something in Doctor Who has warped, and now the Doctor-assistant relationships makes me feel a bit queasy.

What do the five assistants featured on the show since 2005 have in common? Well…

• All are female.
• Four are white.
• Four are tv-thin, and the other is a little less thin.
• Four are in their late teens or early twenties.
• Three have obvious romantic feelings for the Doctor.

Something else that strikes me as interesting is that only one – that’s Martha – had been pursuing a career prior to being doctored. The rest are in transitional periods or stuck in menial work they don’t enjoy. This makes sense- a woman with fulfilling relationships with friends, a job she enjoyed or a great sense or purpose would be less likely to pack everything in and get into a spaceship with a stranger. There is nothing wrong with being in a transitional period, and nothing necessarily right about pursuing a career, but the show, especially in the Russell T Davies era, really likes to emphasise how sad it is to work in a shop, watch TV and eat chips. Accordingly, the Doctor is not seen to be targeting vulnerable or unhappy women, he is seen to be saving his assistants from a life of mediocrity.

The fact that the Doctor usually runs with relatively low achievers also means that these women rarely have useful skills to contribute to the fight against intergalactic evil, aside from the highly feminised skill of listening. It has always been the assistant’s job to connect with others- almost always other women and girls- on an emotional level.

Rose and Nancy the plucky wartime single mother

Rose and Gwyneth talking about boys

Martha and Chan Tho talking about boys

Donna and Miss Evangelista talking about how everyone thinks Miss Evangelista is stupid

Amy telling this little girl she doesn’t know whether or not she wants to get married

Clara comforting this scared alien girl

It is often the case that while the assistant is off emoting somewhere, the Doctor is working on the technical or practical side of solving the episode’s big problem. This creates a super gendered division of labour in which the woman listens and cares while the man acts. While this was definitely already the case under Russell T Davies, this distinction between the man’s job and the woman’s job was less rigid. Rose, Martha and Donna are resourceful, tenacious and capable of acting independently of the Doctor. The Christopher Eccleston Doctor and the David Tennant Doctor form emotional connections and leave themselves vulnerable to loss and pain at various points- for example with Lynda in ‘Bad Wolf’, with Renette in ‘The Girl in the Fireplace’. They do big displays of emotion- the dying David Tennant Doctor’s furious rant about how he is not ready to die is a favourite of mine. Moreover, both of these Doctors are in a loving, affectionate and reciprocal relationship with Rose.

I can’t imagine Matt Smith’s Doctor loving someone any more than I can imagine Steven Moffat having done something to deserve access to clean air and water*. Steven Moffat is a man who thinks that women are so terrifyingly powerful these days that it’s getting really really hard to be a man. He wrote the bizarre, unfunny, sub-Friends festival of gender stereotyping that is Coupling, and the BBC’s Sherlock, a mystery show about a man whose emotionlessness and disdain for women are a source of power.

Under Moffat’s watch the Doctor has morphed from an alien who loves humans and feels their pain and experiences love and desire and empathy to a stunted, child-like and extremely bloody irritating space-goon who flaps about like an injured moth when other people’s emotions are making him uncomfortable. And makes sexist jokes about how women are scary. And wants his married companions to sleep in bunk beds. And can save human lives but does not seem to understand human feelings. Who would travel with this man? He might be zany and charming and have nice boots, but he is fundamentally cold and unrelatable.

I also think the role of the assistant has changed since Steven Moffat started overseeing Doctor Who. Rose, Martha and Donna were chosen to travel with the Doctor because they showed in one way or another that they were smart and up to the challenge. Amy and Clara both come to the Doctor first and foremost as mysteries. Amy is the little girl who grew up with a rift in time in her bedroom wall, who doesn’t know why she doesn’t have parents. She spends many episodes being mystically both pregnant and not pregnant but doesn’t know a thing about it and all our information about it comes through the Doctor. What the fuck is that?

The “mystical pregnancy” makes women in fantasy and sci-fi suffer, exploiting their reproductive capacity as a weakness

Some version of Clara dies on screen twice before she is taken on as the assistant, and it seems like the Doctor takes up with her to find out why. In both cases, the woman is not of interest for her character or her abilities, but for some fundamental mystery in her being. The mystery isn’t even a secret she’s keeping, something over which she has control- it’s something she does not know about, that the Doctor must puzzle out in his own mind. It’s not about her- it’s about what’s wrong with her. When Steven Moffat took over Doctor Who, women became a problem. 

It’s also interesting that Amy and Clara have no family. Rose, Martha and Donna all have family members who are featured in their series as named characters, and they end up back with them when everything is over. Amy and Clara’s home lives are marked by loss and absence. This makes them more vulnerable, more rootless, and more singularly devoted to the Doctor.

I was pretty grossed out but not really surprised when Clara is damsel in distress-ed in ‘Journey to the Centre of the TARDIS’. It reminded me of ‘Flesh and Stone’ and Amy, blind and totally defenseless, groping her way through the woods. The Doctor dehumanises Clara by calling her “salvage”, and the wardrobe department took care to dress her as a little girl. I don’t recall Rose, Martha or Donna being put in such a tight spot. Furthermore, though those three clearly have less know-how than the Doctor, they are at least resourceful and smart and good at taking independent action in a crisis, rather than stroppy or “fiesty” but without any real power, like Amy and, so far, like Clara.

Guys, why don’t I like Doctor Who any more?

The great challenge of the series used to be saving the universe, and that was really fun, but in Series 6 the challenge was saving the Doctor. We’re in the middle of the quite tedious enterprise of finding out his real name. This is not something I care about. We’ve also had two episodes recently dedicated to the T.A.R.D.I.S and sure, one of them was really great, but I like it better when the T.A.R.D.I.S was instrumental to the journey, rather than the focus of a 45-minute voyage of discovery.

In recent series the Doctor has become more powerful and more important relative to the assistant and relative to every other life form he encounters, not within the universe of the show but in terms of how his stuff is privileged over other people’s stuff, his life over other lives, in the structuring of the plot. Now, not only does he have the same powers, the same knowledge, the same spaceship that he always had, but he and his origins are now supposed to be the thing the viewer is interested in above all other things. Like Steven Moffat’s Sherlock, Doctor Who now feels like an icky tribute to the all-powerful man whom we all love.

I wonder if children still like Doctor Who. I have trouble following it these days, and I am an adult with many years of TV experience. Moffat has gotten rid of some of the naffer, more kid-friendly aliens like the Ood (I liked the Ood!) In fact in the three most recent episodes they made a big feature of not giving you a good look at the monster. They’re slicker and scarier and less rubbery than the Ood. As the monsters get more high-concept and understanding the plot starts to require a longer memory and a lot more patience, I wonder if Doctor Who hasn’t maybe become a bit charmless.

Doctor Who should be such a great show for children. It is strongly anti-violence, it has queer characters, a generally positive attitude to difference, and a lovely, mawkish humanism. The villains are often not aliens but bad humans, villainous colonialists or capitalists.

This man makes a vast profit from collecting and patenting alien technology.

This man represents a consortium of banks.

This woman oversees a colonial project which steals alien artefacts with the aim of protecting the “British empire” from alien threats.

Doesn’t that sound great? Don’t you wish it would just keep on with that instead of aiming itself at its audience of typically male long-time superfans? I would love it if Doctor Who stopped trying to outdo itself aesthetically and conceptually and had a stab at moving forward in other ways, perhaps with a female Doctor and a male assistant. There are probably people who would get upset but unlike the year 5 billion*, it would not be the end of the world.

*Joking, I am. We all deserve access to clean air and water. But not to much beloved classic TV shows.

* Do you like my nerdy joke?

Postscript: for fans of bitter ranting, I have written a short follow-up to this piece, dealing largely with how it was received. You can find it here. 

It is not in my nature to brag, but LOADS of people have read my piece about Doctor Who. Really, like…loads. Let’s just say it’s roughly the population of the North Wales seaside resort of Colwyn Bay. I bet that’s super normal for a lot of people, but I am not used to being so popular. For a while there I thought this might be the moment when I become a famous TV writer who has a weekly newspaper column and can comfortably afford groceries. I was obviously wrong, but it was nice while it lasted.

I felt really wary of writing about Doctor Who because even though I like it a lot and have been watching it for many years, much of its viewership is extremely protective and hostile to criticism. I don’t normally worry about not being nerdy enough, but this time I was like “Oh God what if I am not nerdy enough?!”

I got a large amount of comments that were appreciative and thoughtful, and full of new ideas that I hadn’t thought of. But as I anticipated, writing about Doctor Who on the internet is a bit like poking a wasp’s nest with a stick. Wasps will come out, and they will correct your spelling. Note: if I wanted men to correct my spelling, I’d be blogging at www.correctawomansspelling.tumblr.com.

A small amount comments were made with the intention of showing me that I do not have the credentials to write about Doctor Who because of my tastes, gender and spelling. It’s like – have you noticed that often when people want to ascertain whether or not you like Bruce Springsteen they won’t say, “Do you like Bruce Springsteen?”, they’ll say, “Are you a Springsteen fan?” It is a difficult question to respond to. I mean, sure I like Bruce Springsteen! But do I like him enough to tell this person that I am a Springsteen fan, and then face six further questions about Bruce Springsteen which sound friendly but are actually intended to prove to me that in reality I am not a true Springsteen fan but a charlatan? Do I? I do not.

Exhibit A:

“Please do stop watching Doctor Who. Gossip Girl, Glee and other simplistic shows need your viewership. *pats head* Here’s a ball to play with.”

This commenter is asserting that as a woman I would be more suited to watching programmes aimed at women, and leaving men’s programmes to the men…and yet by offering me a ball, he strongly implies that I am a puppy. Which one is it, commenter? Am I a woman or a puppy? When you figure it out, please leave me a note at www.correctawomansspelling.tumblr.com.

There are also a lot of jokers out there who get very angry when you do not publish their screed on your blog. Not publishing a comment is not censorship. You can send two thousand letters to newspapers about how this country is going to the dogs and your neighbours are spying on you. They don’t have to publish them. Because it is not your newspaper.

Power?

It wasn’t within the scope of what I was writing to discuss River Song. But I hate River Song. I think that with her comic/threatening hypersexuality, she is another manifestation of Steven Moffat’s obvious fear of women. I would also strongly dispute the idea that she is a strong or empowered female character. Yes, she does have a gun. But people who imagine that gun-ownership is the same as power are routinely mocked on Doctor Who.

The Doctor replaces Jack’s gun with a banana in ‘The Doctor Dances’

Despite being, arguably, quite badass, River’s story on the show is characterised by powerlessness and frustration, as she is unable to control her relationship with the Doctor, and every time she sees him he knows her less, which makes her all sad and wistful. Her attraction to him is very occasionally reciprocated, but is often framed as unwanted and over-the-top with a side of tragic. Her abilities as a fighter do not make her happy or free.

There are a lot of unhelpful ideas about empowerment around which conflate violence with power. Violence and power are not identical, especially not on the TV, where characters are not real agents but fictional people being shunted around by a writer or a team of writers. I have recently been thinking about power in this way: does this character have the ability to decide what happens to her? Do other people make decisions for her or act upon her in unwanted ways? Is her inability to make decisions about what happens to her part of the drama of the show?

A person can have the ability to do violence to people, for example by having a gun or knowing some cool martial arts skills, and still be written into states of victimhood. Due to unemployment I have recently been watching The X Files. Scully (Gillian Anderson) is an interesting one. She has many of the hallmarks of a modern TV woman- she has a medical degree, she wears a lot of wide-shouldered suits, she has a job which mandates a certain degree of violent behaviour, and she carries a gun. But she does not have the power to decide what happens to her. If Mulder and Scully have pretty much the same job, why is it always Scully who is inseminated by aliens, kidnapped by dangerous hair fetishists, or trapped alone in her apartment with a serial killer with a salamander arm? Eh?

Scully is the most powerful female character that 1993 could come up with, yet she is constantly written into situations in which she is acted upon by others, and frequent violations of her body and personal space are part of the entertainment. It looks a bit like empowerment, but it is not.

So, when Martha decides to leave the Doctor and get on with her life because he treats her badly and makes her hang out with racists, she is given awesome decision-making power! And when the Doctor grabs and kisses Jenny the plucky Victorian detective without her consent, she has her power taken away.

We call this “sexual assault”

Anyway. Next time I’m gonna give myself a break and write about something that almost no-one watches. Like the BBC’s darts coverage, or some GCSE Bitesize programmes that air at 4 am. Or series 14 of Big Brother. Burn! That is exactly the kind of incisive, topical satire you can expect to read in my next post.

I think it’s really important to remember that when asked in a 2009 interview to name a Jay Z song, Miley Cyrus drew a blank. She was talking about her hit ‘Party in the USA’. If I was asked to summarise the spirit of ‘Party in the USA’ , I’d say: ‘We are all the same in America because we all love Britney Spears and Jay Z, so come with me and dance in front of the flag.’ Cyrus is probably ready to leave ‘Party in the USA’ behind, but I’m bringing it back.

“Honestly, I picked that song because I needed something to go with my clothing line”, said Miley Cyrus, mysteriously. Four years later, she’s doing a super enthusiastic job of restyling herself as some kind of countercultural icon. I’ve read some great articles about the significance of the star of Disney’s Hannah Montana looking for cred by using black bodies and black style, at a time when being young and black in America is demonstrably quite dangerous.

While Cyrus obviously didn’t write ‘We Can’t Stop’, I read that she asked her producers to find her “something that feels black”. She’s clearly been planning this for a while. I’d describe the video for ‘We Can’t Stop’ as odious, racist bullshit, but it’s also fascinating and I have watched it at least twenty times. What does it mean when Miley Cyrus, a woman who, as Dodai Stewart points out, has never not been rich, mines black culture like some kind of horrible colonial industrialist for things to use to make her look cool?

In the opening shot of the video, Miley uses comically oversized scissors to snip an electronic tag off her ankle. This light-hearted attempt to associate Cyrus with some kind of criminality is kind of hilarious if you think about how no matter how many DUIs Miley Cyrus gets, she’ll never go to prison for more than 30 days.

While the sexual and other shenanigans in the video were obviously intended to shock and upset, the weird thing to me is that ‘We Can’t Stop’ is run through with some kind of ultra-libertarianism that’s as conventional and American as ‘Party in the USA’. Like this bit:

It’s our party we can do what we want to

It’s our house we can love who we want to

It’s our song we can sing if we want to

It’s my mouth I can say what I want to

It’s my property, and I’ll protect it with as much force as I want to 

Just joking- that last line was by me. Firstly, I’d like to say that nothing says ‘Fuck the man’ like twenty seconds of product placement, or like a whites-only sex party in an enormous empty mansion. What, did your rlly famous dad go away for the weekend and leave you with a load of booze, a doll dressed as yourself, and a man who eats money?

As well as sounding a whole lot like Billie Piper’s ‘Because We Want To’, I think this refrain evokes a world wherein a super rich, white pop star can do whatever she wants without consequences. Like ‘Party in the USA’, the song tries to suggest commonality between the singer and the listener; but this commonality is based on coke and sex, and having the beautiful freedom to do whatever you want.

Dodai Stewart observes: “In the video, Miley is seen with her “friends”: Mostly skinny white boys and girls who appear to be models. But in a few scenes, she’s seen twerking with three black women. Are they also her friends? Or is she just hoping for street cred?”

I don’t think these women are supposed to be read as Cyrus’s friends. Like the money-eating guy, they are there to signify something about Miley Cyrus.

This is very dehumanising

This use of black people as props and signifiers in culture by white people is as old as dirt. There’s a special kind of tokenism in all kinds of movies, especially teen movies, where a main character has a black friend who does nothing but appear alongside them, make them look good, support them, and help them make important decisions for themselves. The kinds of things that humanise and encourage identification with white characters, like being alone in a scene, having an emotional life, having something of consequence happen to them, are not granted to the black friend. The result is something that looks like representation, but is the opposite- it creates a blank, who aids in the representation of someone else.

I bet you can think of a lot of examples of this, but my favourite is in the film Step Up, in which the horrible death of Gage’s friend Skinny is a turning point in the plot, pushing Gage to commit to performing in a dance recital. So at least Skinny didn’t die for nothing. 

Actually no he died for nothing.

This is what the black actors and dancers in ‘We Can’t Stop’ were hired for: to aid in the representation of Miley Cyrus as edgy, changed, adult, and ‘black’.

I really don’t enjoy criticising women. Miley Cyrus is in the difficult position of being a former child star, lumbered with uncool teenage fans. It has historically been the case that the only way for female child stars to transition into adult stardom is with some Spring Breakers-style mayhem, and she’s clearly going all in.

While a large number of female child stars have made this transition through sexual transgression, I think that a lot of the shock value of ‘We Can’t Stop’ is intended to stem from both sexual and racial transgression.  This is possibly what I find most troubling about the video: I think that many of the black people, especially the black women, in the video are to be read as lower-class, unseemly, and highly sexual, and Miley’s association with them is intended as a form of transgression in itself.  And that is really racist.

Here are a few things I enjoyed reading about Miley Cyrus:

‘Let’s Get Ratchet! Check Your Privilege at the Door’ by Sesali Bowen

‘Miley Cyrus Needs to Take an African-American Studies Class’ by Wilbert L. Cooper

‘Miley Cyrus Wants Something That “Feels Black” by Tracy Clayton

This is a short note about Jean-Marc Vallée’s Dallas Buyers Club, which I saw yesterday. The film tells the true story of Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey), an emphatically heterosexual electrician, rodeo cowboy, homophobe, and plaid shirt enthusiast who is diagnosed with AIDS and given 30 days to live. After self-medicating with AZT, drugs and alcohol until he collapses in a Mexican hospital, Ron starts living healthily, and also importing non-approved AIDS treatment drugs into America to sell. The film has two other main characters, neither of whom has a real-life counterpart: Rayon (Jared Leto), a trans woman with AIDS who helps Ron run the Dallas Buyers Club; and Eve (Jennifer Garner), a doctor who is won over by Ron’s approach to treating AIDS and eventually loses her job challenging the medical establishment.

Like Mark from Eastenders, through whom I came to know about AIDS as a child, Ron got AIDS from having sex with a woman. The film protests Ron’s heterosexuality a little too much. In a gesture that I find morally awful, Vallée goes so far as to locate the precise heterosexual encounter which infected Ron with HIV, flashing back to a dark motel room and a woman with track marks on her arm. I am fascinated by the inclusion of these shots, which isolate the moment of transmission and definitively remove the possibility that Woodroof might have had sex with a man, or that any of his other sexual partners, those without obvious physical markers of being IV drug-users, could have given him HIV. The close-up on the woman’s arm assigns guilt for Ron’s infection.

Rayon, the only queer character in the film, is figured as complicit in her own horrible death. Ignoring advice from Ron she refuses to live healthily: at first this manifests as her insisting on continuing to eat processed food, foreshadowing her insistence on continuing to shoot up – again, against Ron’s advice- until she coughs up blood and dies. Eve, her doctor and long-time friend, says she died because she was a drug addict, attributing her death to a personal problem unrelated to the conditions she lived under as an uninsured trans woman with AIDS. As Rayon’s drug use causes her to weaken and die, while Ron’s clean living and happy sexual encounters with HIV+ hotties help him to live, I see Dallas Buyers Club subtly apportioning blame.

Rayon was surely written into Woodroof’s story to connect Ron personally with some of the communities most affected by AIDS- queer people and drug users- and to make it easier to measure Ron’s progress from homophobe to…less homophobe? But their relationship is thin and Rayon is expendable, her death necessary, even, for Ron to truly acquire the status of non-homophobe. I see this as the film’s ultimate goal.

I’ve watched a lot of documentary films about the AIDS crisis recently, and one aspect of responses to the crisis that seems especially radical to me is the formation of non-traditional support and kinship structures around people with AIDS. Dallas Buyers Club is striking in that there is no kinship or community in it- just a line of people with AIDS at Ron Woodroof’s door, waiting to get hold of the medications to which their  membership entitles them. Ron appears at a support group for people with AIDS several times, but the life of the support group is subordinated in the script to the need to tell Ron’s story. In a 20-second scene we hear a people talking about the non-availability of specific drugs while the camera remains on Ron skulking at the back of the hall trying not to make eye contact with anyone, filling the viewer in on the medical situation without making them engage with anyone with AIDS who isn’t Ron. At a later meeting Ron arrives to distribute literature about the buyers club and gets into a confrontation with an FDA representative (what was he doing there?). The support group is cut exactly to the dimensions of Ron’s story, lending a background of desperate, neglected people to provide narrative motivation for Ron’s actions, background info on the crisis,  and a stage for the confrontation between the enterprising individual and the government.

The experience of constant loss which people who lived in AIDS-affected communities talk about in the films I have seen is from a different world to Ron Woodroof’s world- save Rayon nobody dies, or rather, there is nobody in the film whose death you would notice. It is the story of one man who has the tenacity and greed to survive and flourish during the AIDS crisis. Worst of all, it is a film which takes no emotional toll on you whatsoever.

I am glad that I saw Dallas Buyers Club, and there were things I liked about it. However I think it tells a story that does not need to be told. You can read analysis of Rayon’s character as a passive recipient of pity here. And for an account of AIDS activism for access to treatment that isn’t all about one person I recommend this article and the films How to Survive a Plague and United in Anger, which are about ACT UP.

First Dates is the best reality show I have ever seen. It is a simple, inexpensive idea- Channel 4 gets a real restaurant, fills it with single people on blind dates, films them during the dates, and interviews them afterwards. If someone’s date does not go their way they can come back for another, and the viewer can go online and apply to join them.

The way that the footage is edited and narrativised is clear and interesting. The editors presumably have two or three hours of different facial expressions to make reaction shots out of, and they do a beautiful job of telling the stories. If they want to show that someone talks too much, they’ll cut shots of them telling a long anecdote in with shots of their date yawning or looking at their watch. If they want to show that someone has offended their date, the date is shown to get up and go to the toilet immediately – like, immediately – after the other person has spoken. You would be surprised how often this happens- it’s how I now know not to tell Holocaust jokes on a first date. If the date has a positive outcome, the daters are shown beaming a lot, and their breakthrough moments will be accompanied by adorable accordion music.

I have been on two dates, and they were not like the dates in First Dates. I have learned that there is a whole world out there, and it has rules. It is my pleasure to share these rules with you.

1. It’s all about the future

Few people are on First Dates because they want to meet someone cool and see how it goes. Everyone’s terrified about the future. The pre-date interviews always express one or more of the following: my time is running out, all my friends are having babies, when will I have a baby, I keep going to weddings on my own, if I keep sleeping around no-one will ever marry me. There have been two pairs of people over 60 on dates on the show, who just say they’re just looking for companionship- that’s because the future (having a family) has already happened to them. From this perspective, First Dates is shot through with people’s panic, sadness and fear of failure, and documents a widespread unwillingness to imagine a life without normative models of family and happiness.

Poor Carl- women take one look at his hair and assume he’s a player

For this reason, also, the conversations on these dates are super weird. If I had just met someone, I would not ask them where they see themselves in five years, how many people they’ve had sex with, or what they look for in a girlfriend. These are all common questions on First Dates. If you give the impression that you have had a lot of sex, it is over for you.

2. People change in the bathroom

No, silly- not their clothes. Men on First Dates go to the bathroom, start chatting to another man and become monstrous woman-haters of the highest order. I think that fully half of the men who pass through the First Dates restaurant should not be around women, and should instead direct their barely disguised rape threats at themselves, in the mirror, and see how they like it. So First Dates is good for people who are already misandrists, and also people who are thinking of getting into misandry.

3. No rejection without friendship

The only way to reject someone it to suggest that you be friends. You can’t say you don’t want to see them ever again. You just can’t. If any of these friends have actually hung out outside of the First Dates restaurant, I will give £1 to each of the 7 people who read this review of First Dates.

Purdey seems like a really terrible person

4. The “friend zone”- what is it?

I’ve never heard the phrase “friend zone” used in real life, probably because of my entire lack of dates, but it is very commonly used on First Dates. It’s primarily used by men to make women feel guilty for not wanting to have sex with them. It makes it sound like friendship is bad. I think it is because these daters know- as I now know- that being friends with your date just means never seeing them again.

I know that the “friend zone” is supposed to happen to men who are too nice to women- and yet, as soon as a man sees that he is being moved into the “friend zone”, he becomes bathroom-style monstrous and verbally abusive. And that is not nice at all.

5. Compliments are not for men

If your date is a woman, it is polite to tell her she looks beautiful, or to say something nice about one or more of her body parts. If your date is a man, don’t bother!

These two daters are the BEST. The BEST.

6. People are cute / It’s OK if your date thinks you’re weird

One of the pleasures of watching First Dates is seeing people who get rejected on first dates by someone who really doesn’t get their whole ‘thing’ come back for another date, and find someone who totally LOVES their whole ‘thing’. Like Stephan and Angela.

Stephan had a bad date with Nike- she was quite reserved, he was very exuberant, and she suggested they be friends (LOL). Angela also had a bad date with a very rude man.

When Stephan and Angela met, they were super into each other! They had a great time! Angela wasn’t at all put off by the way Stephan repeats one joke over and over again, and she liked his dancing. Suddenly everything that had been grating about Stephan was actually brilliant.

Watching First Dates means watching 45 minutes worth of highly mediated human interaction in a very specific register- a first date! Watching date after date after date really lays bare the conventions, which hardly change at all though the people are all, obviously, very different. It’s sweet and hilarious, and full of great characters and interesting insights into dating culture. I also think that watching it would be a fun thing to do on a real life first date, and I would like someone to try it out and get back to me.

This may or may not be part of an occasional series in which I respond briefly to things I’ve just watched, called ‘I’ve just watched…’ 

I’ve just watched episode 4 of BBC3’s horror series Life is Toff. It’s not really a horror series, it’s a reality show following a family of aristocrats called the Fulfords. They’ve already been the subject of a BBC series, The Fucking Fulfords- I watched about five minutes and had a hate aneurysm, so I can’t say much about that. Life is Toff focuses more on patriarch Francis Fulford’s children, who are aged between 18 and 21. Arthur and Tilly are the oldest- they are twins but only Arthur, because of his penis, can inherit their vast, grimy, crumbling house, Great Fulford. Humphrey is younger, he is in the territorial army and likes killing squirrels and making them into novelty ashtrays, with a terrifying gleam in his eye. Edmund is the youngest.

Although I am a feminist and do try to root for women in all things, Tilly’s ineligibility to inherit Great Fulford is about one millionth on my list of feminist concerns. The show wants me to feel for her but I just don’t. Honestly I think she is dodging a bullet, where the bullet is spending the next decades lording it over a mouldy, broken, filthy house, being watched over by paintings of judgey ancestors, before dying in a horse riding accident or revolutionary retribution murder. Imagine Grey Gardens but lonelier because at least they had each other.

The opening scenes of this episode invite the Fulfords to talk about the history of their family. Shots of Tilly making a mould for a bust of Arthur, for posterity and to get some good footage of Arthur looking foolish, are edited together with various still shots of the judgey ancestors, and Edmund talking to camera about how he doesn’t know who the fuck any of them are, and he doesn’t want to know because he doesn’t really care. Francis, in an interview, expresses some fine sentiments about the history and traditions of their family and his hopes that Arthur will take care of their legacy. All I have seen the Fulfords do so far is kill small animals, fail at simple tasks, and hurt each other. This must be the legacy Francis is referring to.

This week, Francis said he wished he could execute people

The Fulfords way overvalue the history of their family, and talk a lot about it being 800 years old, something I find really uninteresting. I mean my family is 800 years old too, in the sense that I am the descendant of many different people, some of whom were alive 800 years ago. Some of them were alive 10,000 years ago! I wish Francis would say what he means- that he’s better than everyone else.

Every week the children take on a task that is clearly beyond their capabilities. Last week, having no cheese experience, they tried to make, brand and sell a line of cheeses. This week, to rebuild the family’s relationship to the people in the nearby village they used to own, they were tasked with running a stall at the village show and raising money for the local primary school. They raised about £12, by getting children to stick their hands into a tub of baked beans and pull out some prizes.

A scene from one of my recurring nightmares about baked beans

My favourite moment is when Francis is asked if he plans to strengthen his family’s ties to the village, and he answers “Well they can’t let you buy the fucking village back! Don’t ask a silly question. That’d cost millions!”, and then snorts loudly as if the man interviewing him is an idiot. I find it priceless and fascinating that he is asked a question about relationships between people, but only heard a question about the relationship between himself and some property. Things get dark as Francis and Arthur go to look at the graves of their ancestors, and we see a sequence of different gravestones for men named Francis Fulford- this made me feel like their whole universe, and the pride they take in coming from a long line of feudal lords named Francis who lived exactly the same life, is intensely creepy. The closing minutes which show the whole family having a food fight and frolicking in the garden are so forced, they change nothing of what you have already seen.

As usual, the show wants you to laugh at the incompetence of the Fulford children, their bad ideas and poor grasp of how things work, and then for a few minutes at the end to find them charming and eccentric. I think it would be extremely easy to argue that Life is Toff trivialises England’s history of extreme racist violence and its brutal class system, or buries it in the story of these bizarre human relics who are both cruel and quaint, sinister and sympathetic. One local man interviewed for a montage at the end of the show says, excusing their strangeness, “They’re part of England, isn’t it? That’s what it’s part of. England.” I think that if the show retains some ambivalence, it is because what you see the Fulfords doing is too disturbing to be folded back into the dominant story with its upbeat ending.

And so…to the baked beans. I cannot deal with the fact that at the end of the village show they tipped the whole tub of beans out next to a hedge, as if they were going to vanish into the ground like water. Cannot. Deal. The shot that revealed this was so brief- less than a second- but I’ve been thinking about it for like an hour now. I feel like it’s details like this, that can’t be recuperated into the narrative about them being daft and worrying but also just harmless British eccentrics, that reveal how truly anachronistic and wrong this whole family is. There is no accounting for this moment.

I want to talk to them about the baked beans. I’d say, “Do you realise that you can’t get rid of a bathtub full of baked beans by just tipping them onto the ground? They will just stay there for ages. I know you have all these beans now, and that’s a problem, but this is not a solution to your problem.” I want to ask them what other ideas they had for dealing with the beans, and why they rejected them. I want to see them regret it. I want to get them to imagine coming back to that spot in a week and the sauce has soaked into the dirt but the beans are still there. They may still be there right now.

I don’t feel bad for the Fulford children, even though they are these tragic, doomed, useless, miserable, abused people. I think they’re awful. They make me feel vaguely ashamed. I have no doubt that they’re all racist. But I have taken the bait and am saddened and somewhat moved by Edmund. It might be because he is the only one who doesn’t look exactly like his family wed brother and sister for 300 years to keep the bloodlines pure, Targeryen-style. And his siblings are so cruel to him. A lot of this episode was dedicated to the family’s animals, and we learned Edmund’s take on their respective places on Francis Fulford’s hierarchy of priorities- dogs at the top, then sons by age, then Tilly, then lesser animals such as horses. Accordingly I will leave you with this speech by Edmund about the day he found out that someone in his family had killed his favourite sheep, Shaun, one of a flock he was given for his twelfth birthday. And some screengrabs of the judgey ancestors, with humorous captions.

“I opened the freezer one day and there was fucking…a whole lamb in there, all cut up into pieces for fucking dinner, lunch, whatever. One of my lambs. No, I wasn’t really that surprised. They’re always doing these…my family are cold, let’s be honest. I have a cold family. They wouldn’t give a shit about hurting my feelings, they never do. Like when they told me that they shot Percy the pigeon, my old pigeon. You know, you’ve kind of grown up with it, and so it’s fine. It’s a Fulford thing to do! To go kill your one of your brother’s lambs or whatever and put in the freezer. Dad always says, “Fulfords, we don’t have feelings.”

“Are you really going to wear that?”

“By the time I was your age, I was married.”

“On the first date??”

“I wouldn’t know- I’ve never seen an Anna Faris movie.”

by Georgia Mulligan & Thom Andrewes

We started this project back in March while getting together regularly to watch Glee’s sixth season as it aired. Our friend Miriam participated in the process of ranking the characters, and then we continued with the writing. A very short version was published online in the Independent Arts and Entertainment section just before the finale. Here we are just before watching the finale:

A few introductory notes…

Georgia Mulligan (GM): We’ve obviously stolen this format from the ranked lists of characters from Buffy and The L Word. The reason I find this format extra humorous is that ranking fictional characters based purely on your own tastes and preferences is clearly not a valid critical approach. However, it seems an especially appropriate way into talking about Glee because I have a very strong affective connection to the show and the characters which can’t be explained by an evaluation of its quality or significance. I watch old episodes for comfort, and I’ve even been known to watch the musical numbers in isolation. Accordingly, it makes sense to me to take an approach to the show based entirely on how I feel about Rachel, Mr Schuester and Rick “The Stick” Nelson.

In the ranking, we have been generous to people who are extremely talented at performing but didn’t get the screen time or storylines they deserved. It was also our intention that the length of a character’s stay on Glee would not determine their ranking, and that an entertaining character who is in a single episode could be prized high above, say, some embarrassing jerk who is there the whole time teaching show choir and giving speeches. There are a few characters we haven’t listed. If you can think of something—anything—to say about Paolo San Pablo, Rachel’s Funny Girl co-star, let us know.

You may notice that I attribute a lot of the show’s bad politics and bad creative decisions to Glee’s creator Ryan Murphy. Thom does not do this, it’s just me. I’m aware that a lot of people contributed to the making of Glee, and I am clearly using Murphy as a straw man to blame for what I see as its faults, for fun. At the same time, there are certain things that run through everything I have seen that he has created and written, such that I think there can be said to be a coherent system of values unique to Murphy. And I think it is valuable to name it and pick out its components, because a lot of it is the worst.

Thom Andrewes (TA): It’s been a joy to write about Glee through focusing on its characters, because—as someone who writes a lot about pop songs—the way that character is constructed (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) through the appropriation of pre-existing pop vocals is one of Glee‘s most interesting themes. The characters listed below are only a fraction of the cast of Glee, which also includes Madonna, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, Michael Jackson, Aretha Franklin, John Cougar Mellencamp, Stevie Nicks, Barbara Streisand, et al. By performing these songs, the kids in Glee (and the creators of the series) draw on the mythic personas of these artists to ‘complete’ their characterisation. In its six seasons, Glee explores a multitude of strategies, motives and implications relating to such transformations, and the way in which similar mechanisms function on the level of the programme itself, and amongst its fans. Of course, it’s a great show for many other reasons; it’s frequently moving and hilarious, and I will miss it. So without further ado…

THE RANKING:

106.      Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison)

GM: There are different kinds of bad people in low positions on this list. Some of them are boring; some of them have moral defects; some of them are unwatchable performers; some of them are signs of a TV show losing its way. Will Schuester is a hundred times worse than any of them.  Will Schuester is the worst of Glee’s ideology, distilled into the unappealing body of a human man. You can read all the badness of Glee in Will Schuester: he is the ringmaster of the Glee circus of liberal humanism and gay assimilation.

Will Schuester is always saving people from their own disgusting abjection; then he stands back, opens his mouth and lets their gratitude run onto his outstretched tongue. The tearful gratitude of everyone who is not a married white man makes his hair grow thick and curly and gives him the strength to save more people. The big moment is the one where the marginalised person says, “Thank you, Ryan Murphy… I mean, Will Schuester, for showing me a scrap of care even though I am intrinsically unloveable. You are truly the best of men. I had this medal made for you. It was expensive but you deserve it.” Then they go quiet for ten episodes because they don’t actually have a personal or emotional life. Meanwhile, fortified with their gratitude, Will Schuester finds another poor soul to save. Maybe this time it will be a girl. As long as they are good and humble.

105.   Joe Hart (Samuel Larson)

Brittany, when she thinks it’s the Mayan apocalypse: “Joe. You haven’t really made much of an impression on me, and I don’t know what your deal is.”

TA: The rule that all competing show choirs had to have at least 12 members was introduced in the first season, as a way of creating much of the necessary drama that would steer the New Directions to their first competition. However, it quickly became one of the central ‘problems’ that the show writers would have to solve throughout the show, in combination with the natural ‘turnover’ created by setting a series in a high school. For better or for worse, it forced new characters to be introduced and, post-Matt Rutherford (see 20), the show’s (and Mr Schuester’s) central ideology of inclusivity meant that these characters also had to have solos, and therefore they had to have feelings and problems to be expressed in song, which would often be derived from a central ‘type’ or ‘issue’ through which that character would be individualised. Maybe they are in love. Maybe they are trans. Maybe they are Irish.

Or, in the case of Joe, maybe they are… vaguely alternative? …vaguely Christian? What was Joe? Could they have not done something with his dreadlocks and his tattoos and his nose ring? Maybe he could have done some Britta Perry-esque campaigning or led a fun episode about veganism. But no, he was way too serious for that. Way too serious for the show. He certainly gave the impression that he was only there to launch a career as a boring, earnest singer songwriter. He smouldered boringly. At one point he was suddenly in a ‘relationship’ with Quinn. Then he disappeared forever.

104.      Cassandra July (Kate Hudson)

TA: As Rachel’s dance teacher at the New York Academy of the Dramatic Arts, Cassandra July was just entirely inadequate as a nemesis. The necessary ‘step up’ in general talent level between Lima and NYADA never really occurred, and the new college environment was far too huge to really use it as a source for new storylines, so we never really got the sense that Rachel was actually being challenged, beyond the twin arbitrariness of Carmen Tibideaux’s mystic pronouncements and Cassandra July’s irrational and unprofessional resentment. In a way, the fact that she wasn’t really all that good at singing and dancing made the character a bit more interesting, as if she knew from the start that she couldn’t really beat Rachel on these terms, and had to resort to insults and deceit. She was a tragic character, but any hidden depths were abandoned when the obligatory heart of gold was finally revealed, consigning her entire character arc to the ‘Might-as-well-not-have-bothered’ file.

103.      Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch)

GM: We all liked Sue at first, didn’t we? We liked her puns on her own name, we liked the lies she’d tell about her life, we liked how she’d tell Will Schuester in more and more poetic ways that his hair was gross. It was gross, and someone had to tell him. And then you, reader, stopped watching Glee in Season 2, maybe 3, and were left with good memories of Sue Sylvester. I was not so fortunate.

Knowing that viewers love Sue, Glee’s writers went to greater and more cringeworthy lengths to keep her in the story. The first time Sue sang on Glee it seemed like a mistake to me, but it kept happening until it felt like Jane Lynch’s people must have insisted in her contract on a certain number of musical performances per season. I honestly don’t think there’s anyone in the world who wants to see Jane Lynch performing ‘Superbass’ in a pink wig, but we got it anyway. The amount of hyper-contrived Sue-vs-Will drama in Season 6 honestly made me want to cry. To my mind they were taking the least moving, least resonant part of Glee, and building multiple episodes around it. Watching that season was like waking up from a nightmare, going back to sleep and being back in the same nightmare except you’re naked. It did not make narrative sense, it was boring, and it was never over. Glee’s biggest and most consistent problem was a failure to let go of worn-out characters and a compulsion to rehash old conflicts and revisit old relationships. Glee must have some trauma in its past. Glee needs therapy.

TA: I feel I should add my explicit support to the above, in anticipation of potential incredulity at the fact that we’ve placed the show’s most iconic character so near the bottom of our list. For me, one of the key problems was that, as a character who started off as a magic joke villain—omniscient, omnipotent, entirely inscrutable, with access to all kinds of meta-layers—the more central she became to the show, the less the show needed to rely on any kind of logical plotting. She was her own rampaging Deus ex machina, able to justify any plot development because—like a crap Professor Snape—she was simultaneously wholly good and wholly evil. Sue Sylvester ruined Glee.

102.      Jean Sylvester (Robin Trocki)

GM: Sue’s sister Jean is, sadly, nothing more than a sort of externalisation of a facet of Sue’s personality. Viewers of Glee are first lead to believe that, like Adventure Time’s Magic Man, Sue Sylvester is just a rude jerk who wants to hurt people for no reason. Jean, who has Down’s Syndrome, is introduced to reveal that in fact, like Magic Man, Sue is a jerk because she is sad, and she is sad because her sister has Down’s Syndrome. Through her interactions with Jean we see a kinder side to Sue, but Jean herself is a personality-free angel and totally expendable. If you can’t think of a better way to humanise someone than to introduce a disabled family member, and then kill them, you are violent and you have no business writing TV.

101.      Myron Muskovitz (J.J. Totah)

GM: I have never felt so affronted in my life as I was when Myron, a twelve-year-old child, enrolled at McKinley and joined the New Directions. Season 6 was dark and confusing but this was too much, and whenever I saw Myron on screen I yelled at Thom and Miriam about how it made no sense for him to be there. I know that “making sense” is not a good standard to try to hold Glee to, but here is my case: he is at least two years too young to be in a high school; they did not need him to make up the numbers, as a few episodes later Dalton Academy burned to the ground (oh, Season 6) and a large group of Warblers joined the New Directions; he has a bad voice and can’t dance. Some of the bad creative decisions that contributed to Season 6 are understandable, but nothing explains Myron.

100.      Adam Crawford (Oliver Kieran Jones)

99.      Isabelle Wright (Sarah Jessica Parker)

TA: If the tutelage of Kate Hudson saw Rachel cast in a kind of crappy, watered-down ’80s dance movie, Kurt’s profoundly uneventful tenure working for Isabelle Wright at Vogue.com put him in an arguably even worse position. Having escaped the off-the-wall charm of his small-town high school, Season 4 saw Kurt marooned in the vacuous lofts, boardrooms and juice bars of a resolutely pre-9/11, ‘aspirational ’90s’, Diet-Pepsi-ad New York, in which Sarah Jessica Parker had seemingly been cast to provide ‘local colour’. ‘He’s made it!’ we’re supposed to think. ‘He’s finally free to be himself, among his own kind, having brunch and talking about shoes with Will and Grace and Carrie and Samantha and the gang’. We’re supposed to be happy that Kurt has the chance to fetch SJP yoghurt and listen to her sing badly about makeovers and ballet. It’s all very deflating; no wonder he takes sanctuary in a old folks’ home, before swiftly moving back to Ohio. After some initial, vaguely satirical fashion-editor-neurosis jokes, she basically plays herself-as-most-boring-gay-icon-ever. Her presence adds to the banal ‘scripted-reality-TV’ feel of the whole season.

98.      Rory Flanagan (Damian McGinty)

TA: While Joe looked like he was only in the rehearsal room to sell his new Christian rock album, Rory—the other winner of the first season of reality spinoff The Glee Project—always looked just like that: a competition winner. With the possible exception of Unique, the existence of The Glee Project only had a negative impact on the show itself. This was perhaps inevitable, since it seemed to take the whole point of Glee too literally, turning what was originally a quasi-metaphor (real teenagers borrowing fragments of popular culture to express themselves and forge their own identities), into an exercise in cynicism, instrumentalising the same songs to short-circuit success (by playing at being ‘real’ teenagers making such use of these songs (which is what the songs and their original artists do themselves anyway)). The writers seemed consigned to this from the start, and never attempted to give the winners any real involvement in the series storylines, behind a few tokenistic issues to be resolved. Rory’s issue was that he was Irish and therefore no-one could understand what he was saying. He sang ‘It’s Not That Easy Bein’ Green’ (by Kermit the Frog), and he had a nice voice.

GM: I can take or leave his voice.

97.      Ryder Lynn (Blake Jenner)

GM: I originally wanted Ryder last in this list because his total lack of recognisable human qualities offends me, but I realised quite quickly that there are worse things to be than the flesh-and-blood equivalent of a shop window mannequin.

96.      Puppet Sue

GM: Glee became more and more irritatingly self-reflexive through its seasons, and finally ate its own tail in Season 6 when it was revealed that like many Glee fans, Sue Sylvester is a Klaine (Kurt and Blaine) shipper, and keeps a shrine to the couple in a secret back annexe of the garage where she keeps the rest of her Glee memorabilia. Wait! There’s more! Sue tries to manoeuvre Kurt and Blaine back together during the whole season, even though they are as boring as a pile of dust, until in ‘The Hurt Locker: Part 2’ she imprisons them in a fake elevator and releases a Saw-style puppet of herself who threatens to murder them with poison gas if they don’t kiss. I am not making this up, this actually happened on a TV show you used to watch.

95.      Jean-Baptiste of Throat Explosion (Skylar Astin)

TA: I appreciate the need to keep raising the stakes of the competition to provide ever more spectacular ‘boss-level’ challenges, and Throat Explosion, the name of the Cirque du Soleil-inspired adversaries at Nationals in Season 5, is appropriately ridiculous. Yet when the glee club are yet again accosted in a hotel lobby by yet another trash-talking thirty-year-old who will inevitably be taking all the solos, and it’s the dweeb from Pitch Perfect fronting a thoroughly horrible Styx/OneRepublic medley, it’s no wonder the New Directions have got so complacent. The Warblers and Vocal Adrenaline provide better competition not just because they’re musically much better, but because we’ve seen them develop alongside the New Directions. Helicoptering in new competitors might allow for a few new performance gimmicks, but it really takes all of the tension out of the competitions.

94.      Bree (Erinn Westbrook)

GM: There is some serious old school racism in the characterisation of Bree as a temptress who wrecks the chaste Jake-Marley relationship, reveals Jake to be the sexually loose dirtbag he’s always been inside, and breaks Marley’s fragile little heart. She has no discernible motivation: she’s just a hussy.

93.      Sean Fretthold (Zac Weinstein)

GM: Sean is Finn’s buddy who was paralysed from the neck down in a football game. His role in ‘Laryngitis’ is to help Rachel see that her life would go on if she lost her voice, just like his life has gone on since he was paralysed, which is offensive. He sings U2’s ‘One’ for about fifteen seconds and then his vocals are phased out as the number moves from his bedroom to the school auditorium for a performance by some people who have learned from him whether they know it or not and don’t need to think about him ever again.

92.      Penny Owen (Phoebe Strole)

TA: The most boring love interest conceivable for Glee’s most boring (yet bafflingly enduring) character, Penny Owen is basically just a walking ‘meet cute’ who is swiftly removed from the show as soon as her ‘relationship’ with Sam is established. Also, she is apparently ‘a Katy’, as opposed to ‘a Gaga’, which is just the kind of false binary that the Glee writers of later seasons became obsessed with attempting to resolve dialectically.

91.      Brody Weston (Dean Geyer)

GM: Brody is the perfect love interest for Rachel’s “bad dance movie” years in New York. He has an imposing sexual confidence that the Midwestern boys of Rachel’s past totally lack, but is also utterly boring. He encourages her to get a spray tan, a nice sweepy fringe and a lot of black clothes; he is a grown-up and their slightly open relationship suggests that she is growing up too; but there is never a chance that the viewer is actually going to like him, meaning that he is never, ever a threat to Finn’s status as Rachel’s future husband. The revelation that he works as an escort is, predictably, just treated as a bit icky and a sign of low morals when it could have been interesting. ‘It Could Have Been Interesting’ is incidentally the title of my forthcoming book about Glee.

90.      Pam “Hi, I’m Blaine’s Mom” Anderson (Gina Gershon)

TA: To be fair, “Hi, I’m Blaine’s mom” is one of the funnier/better lines in the infamous ‘Red Wedding’ episode in Season 6. It must have been quite an overwhelming day for Pam Anderson (!), as she appears to meet the stepmother of her son’s long-term boyfriend and ex-fiancé for the first time, moments before discovering that they’re now actually in-laws and required to prepare a whole shoulder-jiggling Pointer Sisters number together. And again, to be fair to her, she certainly throws herself into it…

89.      Olivia Newton-John

GM: Watching Olivia Newton-John’s guest appearance in ‘Bad Reputation’, I
found myself thinking, “It’s understandable that she is a bad actor: she’s a singer and she’s probably never acted before”. Then I remembered that she was very famously in Grease, and now I don’t know what to think. She speaks her lines as if she doesn’t like how they’re making her sound.

88.      Cooter Menkins (Eric Bruskotter)

GM: Stodgy-faced football recruiter Cooter appears in Season 2 as a knight in shining turtlenecks to court Coach Beiste and to tell us that there is nobody too ugly or too far from gendered beauty norms to find love. In Season 3, in an ‘issue’ episode about domestic violence, it emerges that he is physically abusive, and Beiste is struggling to leave him. This abrupt transformation is a great example of Glee’s constant subordination of characterisation to the needs of the plot and whatever moral or social message it has for you that week.

87.      Howard Bamboo (Kent Avenido)

GM: Howard Bamboo is just a punching bag with an exceptionally sad face. He bears the brunt of Terri Schuester’s fake-pregnant fake-hormonalness as her coworker at Sheets & Things, and in one episode gets assaulted by the police and arrested for helping Terri to get a steady supply of drugs to give the students. How hilarious!

86.      Carmen Tibideaux (Whoopi Goldberg)

GM: Glee’s most hammy, least subtle characterisation and the limited availability of Whoopi Goldberg combine to make Carmen Tibideaux, the director of the New York Academy of Dramatic Arts. Tibideaux glides in and out of auditoriums frowning and giving off “don’t sing to me I’m busy” vibes. I like to imagine that during the filming of Carmen’s scenes, Ryan Murphy was just out of shot yelling “More gravitas, Whoopi! More gravitas!”

85.      Alistair (Finneas O’Connell)

TA: An arbitrary last-minute character’s even more arbitrary, even more last-minute love interest. O’Connell auditioned for Glee five times; no amount of rejection could have been as cruel as giving him this role.

84.      Millie Rose, Marley’s mum (Trisha Rae Stahl)

GM: If every New Directions kid has to have a somewhat identity-based struggle, Marley’s is that her mum is fat and works in the school cafeteria. While Lauren Zizes (see way, way below) is thrillingly unapologetic about taking up a lot of hallway space, Millie Rose is a more palatable kind of fat woman: the kind that hates herself, agrees that she has a problem, and is on a diet. Her saccharine relationship with Marley is not worth the time it takes up.

83.      Brittany’s parents (Ken Jeong & Jennifer Coolidge)

GM: As if Brittany needed to be more ridiculous, in Season 6 we are informed that her parents are Stiffler’s Mom and Señor Chang, and Brittany and her dad are surprised to find out that her biological dad is actually Stephen Hawking. Just to make this extra clear: Brittany has believed her whole life that her biological father is Korean, and a Korean man has believed that he is her biological father. Shaking my head.

82.      Cody Tolentino, the “Rough Trade Santa” (Bryce Johnson)

TA: Glee had some truly awful Christmas episodes, but none were quite as bizarre as Season 5’s ‘Previously Unaired Christmas’. In a massive departure from the usual kitsch, this was a thoroughly uncomfortable watch involving Kurt, Santana and Rachel inhaling helium and singing Chipmunks songs to a festively dressed sex worker, who ends up robbing the house after tying Kurt up during kinky sex. It had the feeling of an interminable opening scene to a terrible Glee-themed porn movie, and ‘Cody’ was the unwelcome irruption at the centre of it all.

81.      June Dolloway (Shirley MacLaine)

TA: The incursion of socialite June Dolloway, who threatens Kurt and Blaine’s relationship by deciding to patronise Blaine while brusquely denying Kurt’s talents, was an effective reminder of the significant differences in mainstream appeal between the two, and Blaine’s privilege as the more masculine (not to mention straight IRL). However, instead of the promised glamour, the super-rich New York society world into which she introduces Blaine is actually just a bit crappy and underwhelming (while the power that her wealth gives her as cultural arbiter remained entirely uncritiqued). What’s more, Dolloway fails to convince as fierce aesthete, since she clearly has no taste: Blaine initially wins her over with an embarrassing version of ‘Story of My Life’, while Kurt eventually wins her over with an embarrassing version of ‘American Boy’.

80.      Doris Sylvester, Sue’s mum (Carol Burnett)

TA: From Glee Wiki, ‘Doris Sylvester’: “Sue asks her mother one last question—did she ever love her father? Doris exclaims of course she did, and that they fell in love on a Trolley. Together they sing ‘The Trolley Song’…”. As one of my co-authors remarked when we first watched this episode: this is what people who hate Glee think Glee is like!

79.      Madison McCarthy (Laura Dreyfuss)

TA: Most of the Season 6 recruits had about three scenes of character development each. Madison didn’t get even that. She mainly had to pick up the flack from the Glee writers’ attempt to apply their pro-individualism, just-be-yourself doctrine to every form of identity totalitarianism they could perceive, which, by Season 6, included being a twin. Mason emerged from this oppressive relationship to claim several unwarranted solos and a rushed last-minute coupling. Without him, Madison sank into line-less, solo-less oblivion.

78.      Biff McIntosh (Chase Crawford)

GM: Biff, who is Quinn’s boyfriend for a week, is a cardboard cutout of a man who goes to Yale.

77.      Spencer Porter (Marshall Williams)

TA: As ‘post-modern gay’, Spencer did perhaps represent the logical final degree in Glee’s extensive sequence of gay male characters. His self-confidence was framed as the product of six seasons of transformation at McKinley, to the point where an openly gay character would have no need for show tunes or ballads in order to feel at home in the school. In a show that started out with the irreconcilable tension between choir room and football field, Spencer is supposedly the ideal synthesis of the two. But this didn’t stop him from being a macho dickhead when it came to trying to help Roderick. His eleventh-hour, whirlwind romance with Alastair was also totally unnecessary and highly unbelievable, and his one solo number (‘Friday I’m In Love’) was so crap it was almost cute.

GM: Spencer is Glee congratulating itself for creating an America free from homophobia, in which an emphatically masculine handsome young white dude can be as gay as he likes without fear.

76.      Artie (Kevin McHale)

Rory: “You were the glue of glee. The quiet, steady beating heart.”

GM: God, I hate Artie. One of Glee’s inexplicable quirks is that if there’s ever a rap part in a song, the part goes straight to Artie, and he performs it with these awkward “rap” hand gestures, the kind that Lorde loves to do. Another one of its more sinister quirks is that Kevin McHale is an able-bodied man who has some dance skills and used to be in a boyband, and Artie is a wheelchair user, and at some point Ryan Murphy just said “Fuck it” and had Artie get up and dance in various fantasy sequences. Artie is horrible to every girl he dates. Beyond the rapping, the fantasy dancing, and the teenage boy misogyny, Artie is nothing.

75.      Mike Chang Sr. (Keong Sim) and Julia Chang (Tamlyn Tomita), Mike Chang’s parents

GM: Mike Chang Sr. wants to deprive the world of Mike Chang’s clownish dance moves and hot bod by forcing him to go to medical school instead of becoming a dancer. Julia Chang is more supportive because she also wanted to be a dancer when she was young and was stifled by her own killjoy parents. They both come around when they see how talented their son is, and so ends a narrative arc that is not super entertaining and heavily indebted to racial stereotypes!

74.      Maggie Banks (June Squibb)

TA: By the end of Season 5, it was quite clear that Glee’s ‘New York’ had never been anything more than a weird cardboard dream. The retirement home Peter Plan plotline was one of the first times that the sheer bathos of the whole New York experience was fully acknowledged, and (along with Rachel’s bizarre TV pilot), it sort of set up the collapse of this wholly fake environment, allowing the characters to return to (or wake up in) the real setting of Glee: Ohio. (The Wizard of Oz resonances were acknowledged but not fully explored (see 1).) Hence, the faintly depressing retired star Maggie Banks was a little more effective as a character than her counterpoint, the socialite June Dolloway, but neither of these women’s relationships with Kurt and Blaine were allowed to develop beyond the most rudimentary plot requirements.

73.      Dalton Rumba (Michael Hitchcock)

GM: The recurring joke about Dalton Rumba is that he is deaf in one ear because he had scarlet fever. That’s it. He also runs a show choir for deaf children, which the audience is totally encouraged to laugh at until we see them performing and observe their courage and humility.

72.      Grace Hitchens (Eve)

GM: Will Schuester is obviously a man of integrity who cares deeply about education and about national show choir competition rules and regulations. Grace Hitchens, the coach of a show choir at a school for girls getting out of juvenile detention, doesn’t care at all about either of these things, and conspires with Dalton Rumba and Sue Sylvester to throw Sectionals by copying the priceless New Directions setlist. She’s a minor, easily defeated villain. It would have been nice to see her show choir treated as a threat to the New Directions because of their talent, rather than because they’d cheated.

71.      Sugar Motta (Vanessa Lengies)

GM: In the words of Singin’ in the Rain’s Cosmo Brown: “She can’t act, she can’t sing, she can’t dance. A triple threat.”

70.      Marley Rose (Melissa Benoist)

TA: Marley was introduced in Season 3 as if she was going to be the new Rachel, although her character was more along the lines of Sandy from Grease (whom she portrays in the school musical), or Cady from Mean Girls: sweet, naïve, etc. Unlike these characters, though, she is never corrupted or allowed to mature; instead, it is part of the liberal contract of the show that she is allowed to maintain her puritanical sweetness just as Jake is allowed to maintain his moody chauvinism. All through their prolonged relationship, they seem to have no effect on each other, which is kind of interesting when you think about it, even if it definitely wasn’t interesting while we were watching it. Also, it’s sad when she faints onstage at Sectionals, but she was never a very engaging performer. In the gulf between the centrality of her introduction in Season 3, and her total absence in the show’s overblown finale episodes, I think her character must have been the most overt overall failure in the whole series.

Marley also wrote original songs and they were so bad. Were they supposed to be bad? After all, she is just a fictional teenager. Were they carefully written to sound like they were written by a fictional teenager? Or was her character made to write songs to provide a potential alibi for what would necessarily be the poor quality of any original material written for the show (presumably for budget/licensing reasons)? Either way, it was embarrassing for everyone involved, real and fictional.

69.      Alma Lopez, Santana’s abuela (Ivonne Coll)

GM: Santana’s abuela rejects Santana for her sexuality in Season 3. Just in time for what Thom has started calling ‘The Red Wedding’ (love it), she comes around and sees that all love is good, and that there’s nothing wrong with two pairs of twenty year-olds getting married in a barn. Santana’s abuela warns the viewer: don’t be a stuffy old Catholic woman! That is the way of the past! If you want to be in on the future, be part of a radical change in society and leave behind the brutal ways of the past, you’ve got to embrace this new cool thing called MARRIAGE.

68.          Becky Jackson (Lauren Potter)

GM: Like Jean, McKinley student Becky Jackson has Down’s Syndrome. Sue’s baby (yes, Sue has a baby in Season 4; no, I don’t want to talk about it), who never appears on screen, also has Down’s. The convergence of these characters around Sue is deliberate: as discussed above with reference to Jean, they all work to humanise her, to show that she has struggled, and suggest that she does, in fact, have a heart. Whereas Jean is perfect, child-like and loving, and dies offscreen basically to provide an opportunity for Kurt and Blaine to have a heart-to-heart by her grave, Becky spends much of her time on Glee as a copy of Sue. She is abrasive and mean; when she’s not yelling at other students she’s bringing a gun to school. She has an un-nuanced hypersexuality which scares people. Once again, whereas the able-bodied students are rewarded for being true to themselves, disabled students like Becky and Ally (see 53) have an awkward, overdetermined “just like you” vibe which expresses itself as bitchiness and cartoonish sexuality.

67.      Mason (Billy Lewis, Jr.)

GM: This video shows Billy Lewis Jr. and his on-screen twin trying to pretend that their role on Glee isn’t absolutely pointless. The only potentially entertaining thing about Mason and Madison is their Cersei and Jaime Lannister-style incest vibe. I guess there are only so many incest jokes a teen show can make though, and Mason’s interest gets redirected towards Jane, though their romance is not given the time and care it would take to make it interesting.

66.      Clint (Max George)

TA: The glee club’s main rivals Vocal Adrenaline had a weird role in the show, mainly acting as a faceless army of musical mercenaries for whoever was the feature villain of the moment. Their first performances were exhilarating, when they still contrasted starkly with the New Directions’ ramshackle charm, but the hyperactive camerawork and repetitive choreography that characterised their numbers (in particular, that one move where all the men pick up their partners and then place them down on their other side) soon got pretty boring. By the end of Season 6, it was unclear whether we were supposed to think their performances were good or bad (‘Rock Lobster/Whip It‘ anyone?). For a while though—when Mr Schuester was coaching them—it seemed like we were going to finally get an insight into Vocal Adrenaline as a group of characters. Were there hidden depths behind the veneer of this faceless competition machine? Apparently not. Clint was Vocal Adrenaline’s final featured soloist and super-villain at this period and, like him, the entire choir turned out to be horrible, humourless, transphobic crypto-fascists. So there we go.

65.      Maribel Lopez, Santana’s mum (Gloria Estefan)

GM: Maribel is in two episodes of Glee—Season 3’s ‘Goodbye’ and of course the Red Wedding—and does not have a lot going on except showing support to Santana when she comes out, though that conversation happens offscreen before Estefan is cast. It seems really strange to me that Glee cast such a huge star for such a small role, with no opportunity to sing except in the embarrassing mums-only performance of ‘I’m So Excited’ at the Red Wedding.

64.      Hunter Clarington (Nolan Funk)

GM: Hunter Clarington is a poor man’s Sebastian (see 26). I can’t believe the man who plays him is called Nolan Funk—that’s going up on the Glee unbelievable names leaderboard alongside Jacob Artist and Chord Overstreet.

63.      Starchild (Adam Lambert)

TA: Remember when Adam Lambert was in Glee? For, like, ages? He sat around. He sang some songs. He obviously had a lot of fun. It was all kind of pointless, misspent energy, but it could have been a lot worse.

62.      “Stoner” Brett Bukowski (Ryan Heinke)

GM: Like any number of high school movies, Glee has one stoner and brings him in periodically to make the kinds of jokes about drugs that a 40 year-old man would write.

61.      Dani (Demi Lovato)

TA: Remember when Demi Lovato was in Glee? She was a waiter. She was in a ‘relationship’ with Santana after they sang some Beatles together, but it didn’t really matter because we never saw them together anyway. She was never given a surname. She sort of sat around in the background a lot. She played guitar sometimes. Then she was suddenly not in Glee anymore and that was that.

60.      Shane Tinsley (LaMarcus Tinker)

GM: As her boyfriend, Shane encourages Mercedes to demand that people treat her like a Beyoncé, not an Effie White, because Glee likes to mix its cultural metaphors. He is never seen again after Mercedes starts dating Sam; maybe he moved out of state to avoid seeing them holding hands in the lunch line and bursting into tears.

59.      Cooper Anderson (Matt Bomer)

TA: Matt Bomer gives a pretty funny turn as Blaine’s hammy older brother, ‘the guy from the FreeCreditRatingToday.com commercials’. However, Glee fails to deliver the necessary musical numbers to make the sibling rivalry really fizz. The brothers’ initial Duran Duran mash-up is ugly, over-produced and a huge lost opportunity (note Santana’s ‘WTF’ face), while their final reconciliation is crowbarred awkwardly into Gotye’s ‘Somebody That I Used To Know’, which was also a waste of a song that could have been an absolute gift given the right storyline. The main problem is that Cooper isn’t half as good a performer as Blaine. The equivalent storyline in Season 1, for example, featuring Neil Patrick Harris and the outrageously camp ‘Dream On’ duet, was so much better.

58.      Dakota Stanley (Whit Hertford)

GM: Vocal Adrenaline choreographer Dakota Stanley is a straight-up copy of Bring It On’s Sparky Polastri. The New Directions think they need to be professionalised, so they bring in a professionaliser who is super mean to anyone who doesn’t look like Quinn. In the end they realise they don’t need him because their differences make them special and they have what really matters: heart.

57.      Lee Paulblatt (Jim Rash)

TA: He pretty much just plays Dean Pelton from Community, which is not necessarily a bad thing. His cameo clashes rather starkly in tone with the rest of the New York narrative, but that too is not necessarily a bad thing. In the end, the pilot he produces is pretty funny, and at least it catalyses Rachel’s failure and subsequent escape from the living death of Season 5.

56.      Mary Halloran (Kristen Schaal)

TA: She pretty much just plays Mel from Flight of the Conchords, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Her cameo clashes rather starkly in tone with the rest of the New York narrative, but that too is not necessarily a bad thing. In the end, the pilot she writes is pretty funny, and at least it catalyses Rachel’s failure and subsequent escape from the living death of Season 5.

55.      Betty Pillsbury (Ali Stroker)

GM: Ali Stroker came to Glee from The Glee Project for this small role as Emma Pillsbury’s niece Betty. I remember seeing her on the reality show being asked to do things that she knew were risky for her health, like being covered in cold water, because if she made it onto the show she would have to do whatever any other actor was doing. I find this really typical of Ryan Murphy’s practice: he wants everyone to be normal, which means being able to do the same things, and the standard for normal is set by people who are not disabled. Accordingly, Betty is super super normal because she’s a mean cheerleader who says she would never date anyone who uses a wheelchair. She softens up a bit, but only with Artie’s encouragement. I hate that.

54.      Jeremiah (Alexander Nifong)

TA: Jeremiah is the hapless catalyst for the superb Gap flashmob, when he is sexily accosted by sexy Blaine wearing sexy red sunglasses and singing Robin Thicke. For this, I am eternally grateful to him. The scene is also great for the sparks of silent, sad awe that it generates from Kurt, back when Blaine was categorically in another league to him.

53.       Sam Evans (Chord Overstreet)

TA: For such an enduring character, Sam really stood out by not standing out. He never made any real impression on me in his musical numbers, to the point where he seemed to have a different relationship to the music than the other kids did. While the other characters would either inhabit the songs—cheekily or worshipfully—in a kind of karaoke ecstasy, playing at being stars, or else invest them with their own desires, emotions and fears, Chord Overstreet was always just performing his own boring cover versions (the Justin Bieber episode was a rare and welcome exception to this). Sam was a marginal character who became far too central. His defining characteristics were that he liked to do impressions, had a wide mouth, and was a bit dim but not as dim as Brittany.

Having said that, I found the fact that he wasn’t as driven as the other characters quite refreshing. Being surrounded by all that obsessive ‘hopes and dreams’ crap must have been pretty testing, but it was nice that he was able to drift a bit. Unfortunately, he was doomed to complete the prophecy and become the new Mr Schue the moment Finn died. No matter how fast you run, you can never escape your hopes and dreams.

52.      Walter (Harry Hamlin)

TA: Kurt’s older boyfriend for a few episodes. This was when the writers were desperately checking off all the final taboos before the Season 6 finale. It was purely tokenistic, of course; they didn’t have the guts or the writing chops to deal with an inter-generational relationship of this type. Like so many before him, Walter was a prop in Glee’s liberal pretensions, and to add insult to injury, he was made to sacrifice his own role in the show with a banal speech about young love, which would serve to reunite the nauseating Klaine. Personally, I think it could have worked out between him and Kurt…

51.      Rachel’s parents (Brian Stokes Mitchell and Jeff Goldblum)

GM: They’re only in a few episodes (Jeff Goldblum is presumably not cheap), but I like Rachel’s dads. They fill in a piece of the Rachel puzzle. They are apparently affluent, with good taste, fond of singing together as a family, and extravagantly affectionate towards their only child. The scene in which they team up with Finn’s parents to scare Rachel and Finn out of getting married by encouraging them to have as much sex as they like, with the repeated use of the phrase “teenage lovemaking”, is awkward and funny and reads like a wonderful dream/nightmare sequence.

50.      Sunshine Corazon (Charice Pempengco)

TA: Season 2 opened well with the arrival of Sunshine Corazon, an early pretender to Rachel’s prima donna position, who—after an excellent Gaga/Beyoncé duel in the girls’ toilets—is promptly dispatched to a crack house. The episode underlines the ambivalent situation that the club’s increasing success and popularity creates for those involved, and wittily subverts our expectations for the second season (fresh faces, fresh talent), in a manner in keeping with Rachel’s character. Sunshine returns to deliver an impressive rendition of ‘Listen’ from Dreamgirls, suggesting that she could go on to become an effective long-term rival to Rachel. However, this promise is never delivered on.

49.      Rod Remington (Bill A. Jones)

TA: As the cheesy/sleazy news anchor, Remington represented a pretty familiar character type, which has been done better/funnier elsewhere. However, his brief relationship with Sue ends with her turning up to go swing dancing in a massive zoot suit, which is one of my favourite Sue moments (an early, bizarre moment of pathos and humanity from her, before the floodgates of sentimentality had been fully opened).

48.      Dottie Kazatori (Pamela Chan)

TA: There was a weird period during Season 4 and Season 5 when Dottie, Tina’s ‘personal assistant’, became fairly instrumental to some central plot lines. Unfortunately, by then it was almost impossible to care about anything Tina did.

47.      Britney Spears

GM: Britney has the tiniest cameo in the episode ‘Britney/Brittany’, an episode in which Britney Spears helps Brittany S. Pierce understand her true worth when she appears to her in hallucinations. Her relatively high position in the list can be explained by… she’s Britney Spears. (Glee went on to make fun of Britney’s public breakdown, music and eating habits, which was scummy and hard to watch.)

46.      Dustin Goolsby (Cheyenne Jackson)

TA: The Season 2 coach of Vocal Adrenaline had a little earpiece and some funny lines. There was even a little sexual tension between him and Schuester in New York. Then he was fired after VA lost at Nationals. I wanted more of him.

45.      Kendra Giardi, Terri’s sister (Jennifer Aspen)

GM: Kendra is the genius who encouraged Terri Schuester to pretend to be pregnant.She also hates her own kids, which is amusing.

44.      Harmony (Lindsay Pearce)

TA: Harmony was the taunting, blood-red-lipped Shadow Rachel who excelled at the pre-NYADA mixer, amongst an amusing gaggle of Rachel and Kurt clones. She was a tantalising taste of what wasn’t to come, since when Rachel and Kurt eventually did arrive at NYADA, there were no charismatic peers waiting for her, only boring grown-ups like Brody and abominations like the Adam’s Apples.

43.      Donna Landries (Patricia Forte)

TA: Back in the day, Glee excelled at puncturing and undermining its own investment in the familiar genre conventions of competition/sports movies, thereby keeping the arbitrary specifics of the characters’ talents (along with their all-important status as enthusiastic amateurs) nice and grounded. The best example of this came at the very climax of the first season’s competition arc, with the appearance of bemused and disgruntled Ohio Vice Comptroller and ‘state-paid cynic’ Donna Landries, as guest judge of Sectionals: “I have no idea what the hell I’m doing here. I don’t understand what a glee club is.” Unfortunately, by the time she returns as judge of the final sectionals competition in Season 6, the subtle oscillation between sincerity and irony had long since degenerated into a violent thrashing between outright kitsch and cheap surrealism.

42.      Roderick (Noah Guthrie)

TA: Roderick really had an exceptional voice. In that moment when we heard it drifting through the air vents, Season 6 took on a sense of possibility that could never have been anticipated. He was shy and talented and eminently in need of the kind of support that the choir should have been able to provide. He could have been at the centre of a strong final season. He should have had a lot more solos. But instead he was consigned to the background, aside from one idiotic storyline where he’s taunted into climbing a rope for no earthly reason.

GM: I wrote a rant about the “climbing a rope” storyline and how Glee treats food and exercise as moral issues but I deleted it because no-one else in the world watched Season 6 and it’s not interesting to read about an episode in which someone triumphs over their own fatness by climbing a rope.

41.      Kitty Wilde (Becca Tobin)

GM: Was Kitty ever really more than the “new Quinn”? I remember liking her at times, but I don’t remember why. I think she had moments of one-note bitchiness and moments where she wanted to connect with people… so a lot like Quinn, then.

40.      Rick “The Stick” Nelson (Rock Anthony)

GM: Rick “The Stick” Nelson is styled quite a lot like Darren the Emerald Dreams man (see 27); maybe they’re both supposed to evoke a specific breed of Ohioan that I obviously don’t know anything about. Rick The Stick appears in Season 3, flanked by other hockey jocks with mullets who go on to replace the more football-oriented bullies of the first two seasons. He runs for student body president on an anti-taxation, pro-hockey, pro-Rick The Stick platform.

39.      Jacob Ben Israel (Josh Sussman)

GM: Jacob Ben Israel is disgusting. I feel like Glee either invented a new stereotype or got way into an existing one: the sexually abject Jewish teenager, big glasses, creepy as hell, no boundaries and no sexual prospects. Jacob uses his position at the school paper to try and get close to Rachel, who is sensitive to what her peers are reading about her. I feel entertained by Jacob Ben Israel, but also a little uneasy.

38.      Carl Howell (John Stamos)

GM: Poor Carl is really nothing more than a narrative obstacle brought in to delay the inevitable, dull union between Will Schuester and Emma Pillsbury, but he is handsome and fun, and fills Will with entertaining sexual jealousy.

37.      Roz Washington (NeNe Leakes)

GM: Swimming coach and beautiful Olympian Roz Washington is introduced in Season 3 to wind up Sue. Her tirades are hilarious, and she is in every other respect totally redundant.

36.      Mike Chang (Harry Shum, Jr.)

GM: I recently had the revelation that Mike Chang is hot, which I do not mind admitting has increased his standing in this list. He is on screen and spotlighted fairly frequently as a dancer but in terms of the plot is a very minor character. His only notable story arc is in Season 3 when he stands up to his killjoy dad. I actually kind of hate his dance style—he does things like putting his arm up his t-shirt and out the neck hole and pretending to be surprised to see his hand near his face—but I am not an expert, he’s probably technically great, plus… hot.

35.      David Martinez (Ricky Martin)

GM: In ‘The Spanish Teacher’, Ricky Martin is totally charming as Dave Martinez, a night school Spanish teacher who shows Will Schuester up for the fraud he is. Turns out Mr Schue the high school Spanish teacher can’t even speak Spanish! What a crook! Dave’s beautiful smile, tight, tight t-shirts and earnest musical engagement with the kids make for a very entertaining episode, which is hard to come by in Season 3.

34.      Brad the Piano Player (Brad Ellis)

TA: Along with the hugely talented and flexible student band, Brad the piano player was permanently on call for every after-hours declaration of love or tearful apology. In each case, he remained eminently tactful and professional, and his presence allowed the musical numbers to stay primarily rooted in the ‘live’ context of the choir room, and not fly off into karaoke backing-track mode, which was always way less interesting. The gradual acknowledgement of Brad’s presence also marked the beginning of Glee’s burgeoning meta-awareness, which, however unbearable it became in the end, was pretty fun to begin with.

33.      Jane Hayward (Samantha Marie Ware)

GM: Jane is the best of the Season 6 New Directions. I was excited about her at the start of the season. She’s serious but likeable, and she does a winning performance of Janelle Monáe’s ‘Tightrope’. Plus she has a cause: she’s the first girl admitted to Dalton Academy, and she wants to be a Warbler. So I guess that’s sort of feminist? Unfortunately most of Season 6 was dedicated to the twin evils of Klaine and Sue Sylvester, and the new kids just sat at the back of scenes dedicated to people you loved years ago. The judgement that Glee’s viewers would rather see old problems and situations replayed again and again than watch the journey of a new batch of young characters was lazy, and made the show’s sixth season pointless.

32.      Jake Puckerman (Jacob Artist)

TA: Jake is introduced with the eye-rollingly familiar ‘bad boy softens up’ storyline, although his brother Puck is on hand to speed up the process a bit. However, he’s a bit more interesting in that he’s not just another generic sadistic-bully-who-just-want-to-be-understood bad boy. He has a quiet self-confidence which resists the glee club moralisers’ attempts to break him, and the pressure to sink with the wet, vapid Marley into boring coupledom. What’s more, I would argue that he pips even Unique as the best performer of that generation. His rendition of Ne-Yo’s ‘Let Me Love You’ is better than the original, and the best musical number from Season 4. He is thoroughly short-changed for solo features, by the mere existence of Ryder, but he doesn’t care, which is probably quite healthy.

31.      Ken Tanaka (Patrick Gallagher)

GM: There is something quite unsettling about football coach Ken Tanaka’s Season 1 storyline. He loves Emma Pillsbury, who does not love him and in fact finds him disgusting, and in full knowledge of this he asks her to marry him and bends over backwards to make sure that their wedding is private enough to accommodate how ashamed she is of him. He is made even more cartoonish and inhuman by the fact that he wears the same clothes every day, like a Simpson, with some variation in colour.

30.      Principal Figgins (Iqbal Theba)

GM: Figgins is memorable for his unique turn of phrase and total lack of natural rapport with high school students. It’s genuinely hilarious to see someone shout “Quiet, children” at a room full teenagers who are already quiet. The power struggle between Figgins and Sue results in her becoming principal and him becoming the school janitor, which seems particularly unfair as he is clearly a gifted administrator who loves using a calculator and telling people the school can’t afford to run their favourite extra-curricular activities.

29.      Shelby Corcoran (Idina Menzel)

GM: This wonderful piece of casting further embeds Rachel in a tradition of great Jewish musical theatre stars! Wicked and Frozen star Idina Menzel appears in Glee initially as the coach of rival show choir Vocal Adrenaline. The revelation that she is Rachel’s birth mother is surprisingly underwhelming and changes very little: Shelby goes on to work at McKinley as the coach of the Troubletones and to raise Quinn and Puck’s baby with no apparent desire to forge a relationship with Rachel, and no awkwardness or bad feeling about it on either side. Menzel is, obviously, wonderful throughout this ridiculousness, and her participation in Glee makes Rachel’s performance of ‘Let It Go’ at the beginning of Season 6 a bit smarter.

28.      Dave Karofsky (Max Adler)

TA: In a similar manner to Santana and Brittany, who were ripped from their clichéd cheerleader status and placed centre-stage, Karofsky’s development through all six seasons could never have been predicted. However, it was actually kind of lovely. From starting out as Kurt’s generic oafish bully, he experiences an intense and surprising bout of gay panic, which coincides with him being made Prom King opposite Kurt’s Prom Queen. After leaving the school, he is rediscovered months later, in a bear bar, entirely convincing as a comfortable gay man, although he will later experience bullying himself and attempt suicide: a bit of ‘poetic justice’ which seemed unnecessary and laboured. He moves through the series as Kurt’s double, and so the fact that he eventually begins dating Blaine is rather fitting (even though this relationship was never properly justified or believable (like pretty much all the gay male relationships in Glee)). I would have quite liked to see Blaine end up with Karofsky, or at least for those tensions to be further explored, but obviously the magic laws of TV won through in the end, and Karofsky’s long journey ends in anticlimactic kitsch, along with the rest of the series.

27.      Darren (Aaron Hendry)

GM: Darren is part of Finn’s origin story: an ’80s vision (despite the scenes in question being set around 2000) with a ginger mullet, who works for a company called Emerald Dreams, spraying people’s lawns green in a virile fashion with a massive hose. Darren breaks Finn’s mum’s heart and leaves behind, in the young Finn, a love of classic rock. Darren and his music are associated in Finn’s memory with freedom and a specifically masculine form of self-expression whose inauthenticity and inadequacy are suggested by Darren’s job, helping people to pretend their suburban lawns are healthy. The return of these memories provides the motivation for Finn to commit himself to glee club by performing the classic rock song ‘Don’t Stop Believing’. These moments are a celebration of pop music tinged with a sad nostalgia; this is such Glee.

26.      Sebastian Smythe (Grant Gustin)

GM: At first glance, Warbler Sebastian is simply a less exciting Jesse St. James in a blazer. I find him interesting because he fits perfectly into Ryan Murphy’s Victorian value system: what is villainous about him is that he is promiscuous, he’s into Blaine even though Blaine has a boyfriend and he tries to break up the relatively sexless Klaine partnership. When that all amounts to nothing, he throws a slushie full of rock salt in Blaine’s face, forcing him to wear a sexy eyepatch for one or two episodes.

25.      Emma Pillsbury (Jayma Mays)

TA: Like many TV characters, Emma lost all her appeal the moment she settled into her hetero coupling, and her role was reduced to dispensing wise words of encouragement and backrubs to her husband in his moments of self-doubt. Before the wedding, though, she was an interesting, funny character who was never reduced to her disability. Her relationship with Ken Tanaka was almost Hardyan in its tragic, stifling poignancy, while her subsequent sexual awakening was the best thing to come out of the Rocky Horror episode. Of course, it all went downhill from there, and the Pillsbury-Schuester synchronised-swimming ‘proposal number’ was a heinous waste of Rihanna’s best song. For some of Season 6, she was played by the back of someone else’s head, which was kind of funny.

24.      Holly Holliday (Gwyneth Paltrow)

GM: Like all decent people I am a card-carrying Gwyneth Paltrow hater, but for me Holly Holliday is the best of Glee’s celebrity guest roles. She shows up infrequently, she sings a horrible song that makes you hide your face and block your ears, she delivers some hilarious one-liners, she confuses Will Schuester, and she’s out of there. Also I think she might actually care about the kids?

23.      Noah “Puck” Puckerman (Mark Salling)

TA: Puck ultimately suffered from one of Glee’s most problematic trends: it’s injunction, usually via Will Schuester, to ‘be a man’. This is all that the show can really offer to its stock of jocks, ideology-wise, and it usually translates into ‘take responsibility’/‘take control’. Thus, Puck ended up a depressing, uniformed sap, but the character’s early arc was pretty great. Multi-talented, confident and charismatic in a way that was hard to channel, Puck wavered between attempted demonstrations of good will and fits of self-loathing, the latter providing the context for an adorable duet with Coach Beiste, singing Taylor Swift’s ‘Mean’. He gave us a sexy serenade for every character he sequentially wooed, which was most of them. It’s a pity all that energy came to nothing.

GM: Mark Salling was one of the oldest actors playing a teen on Glee and, unlike Cory Monteith, always looked it. I quite like that, though: it contributes to the general sense that Puck is a throwback, created equally by his performance style and repertoire of songs by people like Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen. Puck never had the youthful momentum and optimism of the characters played by younger actors; he seemed to have given up hope, like a man in his late twenties who was still in high school could well have done.

22.      Lord Tubbington

GM: Brittany’s cat Lord Tubbington was my Facebook background image for several months. He likes scientology, leather and melted cheese.

21.      Sandy Ryerson (Stephen Tobolowsky)

TA: Glee begins with the firing of the flamboyant, Josh Groban-loving Sandy Ryerson as director of the glee club, but he continues to haunt the school for at least the first season, largely in the capacity of drug dealer. He represents all the camp and tackiness of music theatre, which the clean-cut, boringly straight Schuester quickly effaces with his tenure; hence, he plays an important role as the return of the repressed: the real face of show choir loserdom. He was also the show’s only ‘joke gay’, among a huge array of queer characters, which is probably why he didn’t survive long beyond Season 1. This was a shame though, because he lit up every scene he was in: at turns monstrous, pitiful, hilarious, and ultimately sympathetic.

20.      Matt Rutherford (Dijon Talton)

GM: Matt Rutherford, man. Three lines in nineteen episodes. Life’s not fair.

19.      Burt Hummel (Mike O’Malley)

TA: Surely none of the other characters on Glee had as eventful a few years as Kurt’s dad Burt. He fell in love, had a heart attack, got married, ran successfully for Congress, was diagnosed with cancer and recovered, all before seeing his stepson die and his own son get married. However, none of this was as significant as his relationship with Kurt. Extending Kurt’s coming-out narrative over the course of several episodes gave it a depth and detail that was rare for Glee’s usual open-and-shut ‘issue’ storylines. Burt’s responses were never crudely drawn, and his personal transformation—to the point where he was dancing to ‘Single Ladies’ at the end of Season 3—was both adorable and believable.

18.      Unique (Alex Newell)

GM: Newell, who came to Glee from The Glee Project, is a fantastic singer and performer, and it is to his credit that Unique is such a watchable and likeable character, because he is given very, very little to work with. As far as I know Newell is a cis gay man and excellent drag performer, not a trans woman, which is obviously its own serious problem. There is a lovely camaraderie between Unique and the other girls in Glee, but this is mostly seen during musical numbers. Her only two notable moments in the plot are both moments when her gender identity make her miserable: when she “catfishes” Ryder, making him believe she is a thin, cis, white girl on the internet because he would never love her as she is; and when she is being harassed in the girl’s toilets. While these reflect real difficulties that trans teenagers have, they also both focus on her embodiment and on the idea that there is something wrong with her. It all felt a bit punishing.

17.      Coach Beiste (Dot-Marie Jones)

GM: Sheldon Beiste replaces Ken Tanaka as coach of the football team after Tanaka is forced out of the school by heartache and humiliation. Beiste spends Seasons 2 through 5 presenting as a butch heterosexual woman, and in Season 6 comes out as a trans man in what honestly seems like a badly thought-out bit of box-checking on the part of Glee’s writers—I can see them in the writer’s room asking, “Who haven’t we done yet?”. The depiction of Sheldon’s social transition in the episode ‘Transition’ feels botched: it is used to provide another opportunity for grandstanding about inclusiveness and allyship, and spotlights Will Schuester, who gathers a vast choir of transgender singers to serenade Beiste, rather than focusing on Beiste’s experience. Bringing Unique back for a heart-to-heart does provide a nice moment of community and solidarity. Sheldon’s friendship with Puck, based on shared feelings of social frustration and outsiderhood, is memorably heartfelt and touching, and he makes a good contribution throughout the series, in serious moments and silly ones.

TA: “Do not get up in the panther’s business, lady! You’re all coffee and no omelette!” “That’s a steer with six teats and no oink!” There was a point right at the beginning of Coach Beiste’s time on the show when he showed a penchant for bizarre idioms, which was fun. Also, his (country-heavy) musical contributions to the show were few but very strong indeed.

16.      Bryan Ryan (Neil Patrick Harris)

GM: One of the things Glee is very preoccupied by is the idea that “the arts in schools” are under threat. I’m sure this is true, but it’s something that the show mobilises a lot as a threat which is functionally very boring. Budget cuts and the prioritisation of science and technology over the arts are not great narrative fodder for a teen musical show. Bryan Ryan is the fun face of this boring Glee hobby horse. He comes to McKinley in the Season 1 episode ‘Dreams’ as a school board employee looking to gut the school arts programme because he’s bitter that his Broadway career never worked out. He literally tells the kids their dreams will never come true. I don’t like his manly rivalry with Will Schuester but I do like him as an angry, sad, implicitly queer failure who makes everyone’s week a little bit darker.

15.      Suzy Pepper (Sarah Drew)

TA: Suzy Pepper was the student whose romantic obsession with Will Schuester led to her eating the world’s hottest pepper. On the basis of her previous unhappy experiences, she is able to give Rachel sage advice about self-respect. However, she’s just as notable for her commitment to her own personal brand: all her accessories are pepper-themed! It’s a bizarre, brilliant cameo.

14.      Carole Hudson-Hummel (Romy Rosemont)

TA: Ever since she hurled that carton of milk in the first episode, Finn’s mom Carole was so much more than just another supporting character. She had a very real emotional life of her own, whose complexities clashed with her son’s teenage idealism, making for a brilliant chemistry between the two of them. This only made the bedroom scene in ‘The Quarterback’, after Finn’s death, all the more devastating.

13.      Quinn Fabray (Dianna Agron)

TA: From the very start, Quinn’s character was far more nuanced than the spiteful teen movie cheerleader she was set up to be. She was as angry as Santana and as melancholy as Kurt, but her redemption didn’t present itself so easily. Hence, she was always a little distant from the rest of the group, even in the extreme openness of the choir room; she was more grown up, and her problems were more grown up too. But she was also much more than a cautionary tale. The complexities of her character went further than the particularities of her pregnancy. She had her own crises of identity, but it was as much her faith (which seemed challengingly real and impenetrable, for such a humanist show) as the choir that saw her through. She took what she needed from the glee club and then went on to have an actual life, and it was to her credit that she didn’t end up revisiting her old school on a weekly basis like so many of her peers.

GM: I like Quinn best when she has what my friend Josh, with reference to Sansa Stark, called a “disillusioned fairy-tale princess vibe”. She’s been head cheerleader, she’s been prom queen, and she knows it’s not worth it. And I agree with Thom that the fact that she doesn’t hang around her old high school long after graduation to inspire the next generation, while it’s presumably the result of Dianna Agron wanting to move on, is totally consonant with her character.

12.      Lauren Zizes (Ashley Fink)

GM: Lauren Zizes’s fairly brief promotion to regular cast member in Season 2 is a beautiful gift to people who love fat babes and angry women. Lauren is confident and challenging and hilarious, and her role does not lean excessively on humiliating physical comedy and gross-out humour, something which is unfortunately rare in representation of fat women in TV and film. Her romantic relationship with Puck is sweet and interesting: while he is troubled by being so attracted to her, she never doubts that she deserves him. For this and so much more, she is the 2011 McKinley High prom queen of my heart.

11.      Tina Cohen-Chang (Jenna Ushkowitz)

TA: Tina was grating, mopey and undignified, and never a particularly outstanding performer, but this was what made her so integral. Her grudges and hissy fits were totally understandable in the context of a choir room where the attention lavished on three or four star performers was entirely at odds with the purported ideology of inclusiveness and the triumph of the underdog that was so forcefully maintained. And while so many of the other characters knew when to sit in the background and shut up, Tina never lost her righteous anger at the injustice of it all. For much of the time, she was the only character who acted like a human being, let alone a teenager.

10.      Terri Schuester (Jessalyn Gilsig)

GM: The characterisation of Will’s first wife Terri draws on sexist stereotypes—she’s domineering and materialistic, and she lies about being pregnant for months to keep control of her husband—but I still get a lot of enjoyment out of watching her. I think she resists being totally subsumed into these characteristics by being too much. She’s not just a run-of-the-mill shrew, she’s genuinely bizarre. Her twisted, unhappy relationship with Will is way more entertaining than his dramatically worthless marriage to Emma Pillsbury.

9.      Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley)

TA: Mercedes’s story (which blurs with Amber Riley’s story) goes straight to the heart of what made Glee so great for me. She was just as good a singer as Rachel, arguably even better, so why wasn’t she the star of the show? It had everything to do with the differences in their repertoire, and the way they inhabited the personas in these songs. Rachel had a huge, trans-historical cast of song avatars ready, through whom she could tunnel her way to success. Her songbook lined up with the ideology of the show, and of much contemporary (white) female-led pop, perfectly: she was a blazing comet, preternaturally resilient, better than the world. Mercedes’s repertoire was in many ways more grounded, less transcendent, but she also inhabited it less obsessively. She was always too nice to be fierce; her faith prevented her from getting too sexy. Hence, she couldn’t ever really use these songs as weapons, in the way that Rachel did, or to steer the show in her direction. She excelled, but she was also always frustrated, and that frustration was always justified. In this way, her rivalry with Rachel had a lot to do with race, and the different ways in which black and white women appear as the subjects of songs, in relation to the kind of ideological frameworks that Glee employs.

8.      Jesse St James (Jonathan Groff)

GM: I think Jesse’s strong appeal has to do with a tension between his obvious coding as gay and the hetero-masculine sexual threat he is supposed to represent both to the virginal Rachel, and to Finn who is clearly figured as Rachel’s sexual and romantic destiny. Jesse, like Rachel, is intense, silly and over-earnest. He has great lines, and a camp supervillainous quality that warbler Sebastian fails to pull off. Seeing Jesse and Rachel married, killing it in twin broadway careers, and anticipating having children in the series finale’s inevitable but depressing flash-forward felt like a retrospective denial of all the risky sexual ambiguity I had loved in him.

7.      Brittany S. Pierce (Heather Morris)

GM: I would need many years to really think through why I love Brittany. In the meantime, I offer the following remarks:

• Heather Morris is a spectacular dancer and I love every tiny move she makes. I find it incredible that even though Heather Morris can be seen here in her pre-Glee days dancing beside Beyoncé, when there was an episode about someone learning and doing the ‘Single Ladies’ routine, that person was Kurt.
• Brittany wrote ‘My Cup’, the best of Season 2’s original songs.
• Even though Heather Morris’s face is generically hot enough for her to have modelled
  for stock photos, I find it very compelling. She reminds me of a lion. Her styling always interests me, when she’s not in the Cheerios uniform. Brittany’s ‘natural’ make-up and loose clothes, which are often in floral prints or have images of animals on them, match her unstudied charm and childish, optimistic outlook on life. There is certainly an argument to be made about whiteness here: her clothes mean that she is figured as innocent, even though she is no less promiscuous than Santana.
• Brittany starts out on Glee as a dumb slut, and the fact that she often has sex with Santana was just a joke about how slutty they both are. They’re so slutty, they don’t even care about the gender of the person they’re being slutty with. However, during and after the development of her romantic relationship with Santana, Brittany has an emotional intelligence that I can’t get over. She always knows the right thing to say, even if she says it in a weird way, and she tells people how she feels about them without any hesitation. Also, with all of Glee’s hand-wringing about the misery of being a LGBT teen, which uses the white gay male as the model of the LGBT teen, it is really thrilling to have a character who is carefree about being bisexual and experiences it as a positive part of her life and identity. The stuff about Brittany believing that Rory is a leprechaun, or her mixing up the words “lesbian” and “lebanese”, all started to seem trivial to me once I realised that Brittany is an emotional genius, and a unicorn, or maybe a bicorn.

6.      Blaine Anderson (Darren Criss)

TA: The Dalton Academy Warblers were integral to the success of the second season; they kept the musical direction of the show connected with the American a cappella tradition and produced many of the best numbers. Let’s face it: they were the New Directions’ only real competition. We were introduced to lead Warbler, Blaine, through Kurt’s eyes, as the prince of a kind of gay male utopia. His initial incarnation as both subject and object of Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream’ remains one of Glee’s best moments. Perhaps the writers never quite developed a fully rounded character for Blaine. His clingy, irritating relationship with Kurt certainly sapped a lot of the energy and sexuality that he initially radiated, and his ultimate matrimonial fate remains profoundly depressing. However, he brought the choir room to life with his performances, which were always full of playfulness and joy, and this infected the group performances as well. Unlike Sam, he never looked like he was just screen-testing a pop video. He emerged as one of the series’s strongest, most versatile performers, and pretty much carried the New Directions through four seasons of competitions single-handedly. Without Blaine, much of Glee would have been unwatchable.

5.      Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer)

TA: Kurt stood out from the very first episode. While Rachel and Mercedes were clearly future stars, and brilliant casting discoveries, Kurt was something else. He always looked out of place in the group numbers (in an endearing way), but when he had a solo, he took total ownership of it. It helped that his voice was so utterly unique. He couldn’t ever do a ‘straight’ cover; whether the repertoire was male or female, the result would always be somewhat queer. And with the androgynous voice, the ageless face, the frustrated, sexless pout and scowl, he embodied the kind of teenager that Glee was supposed to be all about. Looking back at early episodes, Kurt’s transformation really has been incredible, and that’s not just because he looked so young back then. He certainly came into his own, but it was a gradual process and always on his own terms.

I found his relationship with Blaine frustrating, as it seemed to come out of nowhere. A few lingering glances during songs (in particular, a well-timed rendition of ‘Blackbird’ by the Beatles), and suddenly they’re engaged. Kurt had more sexual chemistry with Finn than with Blaine. Still, this doesn’t mean his confidence was unearned. It’s to his credit that he never really seemed to fit in at NYADA either, or in New York more generally. His outfits always looked faintly ridiculous. He never got the solos he deserved in those later seasons, which was perhaps part of an effort to make him seem more fully assimilated within an increasingly vanilla cast.

GM: I would like to add that in group numbers I watch out in particular for two people. I watch out for Heather Morris because she is a perfect angel, and I watch out for Chris Colfer because he has no rhythm. He emotes as hard as he can with his face, but whatever his body is doing is always wrong. It’s fascinating.

4.      Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith)

TA: On paper, the story of Finn—the football jock with a secret love of singing—is such a familiar one that it could have really not worked. The fact that it did work is testament to the complexity and depth of Finn as a character, and to Monteith’s charming, unconventional presence. With his absent, military father, and his early grapplings with the prospect of his own fatherhood, Finn’s problems were often framed in terms of masculinity. As with Puck and Sam, the show’s (and Mr Schuester’s) solution to Finn’s crises of masculinity was simply to redefine masculinity, without problematising the central injunction to ‘be a man’ (‘understand what it means to be man/be a leader’, etc.). But, thankfully, this was never quite enough for Finn. Not only was he too awkward or too astute to fully emulate Mr Schue as ‘manly’ role model (eurgh), but Glee clearly showed us that, unlike football, the choir room doesn’t actually require this repertoire of ‘masculine’ skills. It’s too heterogeneous a space, in some ways too queer: the politics are nowhere near as simple as the football field. And, in the same way, the musical persona that Finn brought to the choir room, in the form of an almost naïvely macho classic rock, left him constantly out of his depth, however deeply invested he was in it. In this way, it was interesting to watch Finn try to compete with Jesse, and later Brody, who were far more at home in Rachel’s world.

After discovering that his father hadn’t died in action, but from an overdose after being dishonourably discharged, he decides to join the army to ‘redeem’ his father. However, he  is also soon discharged, after he accidentally shoots himself. This, too, was not enough; yet Finn gained depth as a character through his failure to ever be ‘enough of a man’. In addition, his profound lostness, next to Rachel’s single-minded determination, made their relationship a very real problem, and therefore one of the few interesting relationships in the show.

GM: Glee handled Monteith’s death beautifully, I think. Tribute episode ‘The Quarterback’ blurs the world of the show and the world we live in in such interesting ways, which mirror the way Lea Michele talks about Monteith in this public appearance after his death. She places no great distance between the love a fan might have for Finn, or for Monteith, or both, and the love of someone like herself who knew Monteith personally; she suggests that their grief connects them. Finn and Monteith are not identical in Michele’s speech, but they are close together because they are both loved, and both gone.

‘The Quarterback’ fails intentionally to distinguish between the characters who loved Finn and the actors who loved Monteith, and is also addressed to fans who may have loved them both. The opening number and the projected photograph of Monteith/Finn (he’s in his football uniform, but it’s a publicity shot) are all plausible within the diegesis, but they are plain and non-narrative to suggest a tribute by the actors. During the episode, sometimes the actors’ emotions and the characters’ emotions are indistinguishable; however with Rachel’s number, the actor is clearly upset but the vocal track she is miming to is flawless; and with Santana’s number the breakdown in the voice and performance are clearly scripted. When Kurt says he doesn’t want people to dwell on the way Finn died, his remark is clearly intended to also reflect on Monteith’s death. Filmed under what must have been terrible conditions, the whole episode deals perfectly with a great loss by acknowledging the strong and complex affective bonds circulating between the actors, characters and fans.

3.      April Rhodes (Kristin Chenoweth)

GM: The reason I wanted April so high on the list, aside from wanting to mess with Glee orthodoxy, is that she carries a lot of the show’s interesting preoccupation with failure. An old classmate of Will Schuester’s who periodically ends up back in Lima, April is very open about the fact that she’s lonely and drinks for comfort because she’s unlucky in love and her big showbiz dreams never came true. In her interactions with the students she is cheerful, open and energetic, but with an edge of disenchantment that makes her seem like she has been through too much. Characters like April warn the kids that being talented won’t necessarily make you a star, and that success is not a simple reward for hard work but is given out arbitrarily. You could have the voice of a Broadway star and still end up alone in central Ohio with a box of wine. Kristen Chenoweth is perfect as April.

2.      Santana Lopez (Naya Rivera)

TA: Santana was Glee’s most interesting character, and hers was Glee’s most interesting storyline. From an initial role as ‘Bitch Cheerleader Cliché 2’, she gradually forged a niche as one of the only characters to never fully sink into happy-clappy sentimentality, and to cling on to the stubbornness and the ambivalence that allowed her to stay real. Her relationship with Brittany (which, unlike the cloying ‘Klaine’, always had intensity, chemistry, verisimilitude) evolved unexpectedly yet organically out of what was initially a joke about how pansexually promiscuous the characters were. Santana’s growing self-awareness as a lesbian accompanied a growing self-possession within the show, through which she took command of her own character and began to dominate storylines.

From some unconvincing early vocal performances, she also became one of the show’s strongest singers. Most of all, more than any other character, Santana’s narrative permeated through her vocal performances, making these performances central to her development. Her Fleetwood Mac covers in the ‘Rumours’ episode were entirely convincing as the unspoken articulation of her love, while her shocking outbursts following the Troubletones’ Adele medley, and much later in her tribute to Finn (‘If I Die Young’, which poignantly echoed the earlier moment), provided Glee with two of its most effective uses of music.

1.      Rachel Berry (Lea Michele)

GM: When we published a very stripped-down version of this list in The Independent, an irate Gleek commented on Twitter that only Ryan Murphy would have put Rachel at number one. We are not Ryan Murphy! But I think that the things I love about Rachel are the things that I am supposed to love. I am truly moved by Rachel’s often offputting single-mindedness, her total lack of chill, and her unashamed self-assignation into a genealogy of great performers. I love Lea Michele’s gestures and mannerisms as Rachel; her upright posture, brisk walk, wide smile and careful way of speaking belong to someone committed to living every day as if it could be the day they become a star.

Glee’s ability to switch quickly between camp and earnestness is beautifully enacted through Rachel. Her very uncool drive towards musical perfection and her old-timey showbiz dreams are often played for laughs, but there are memorable moments, often at crucial narrative climaxes, where her all-out love of performing and her ability as a performer are celebrated. She wrote ‘My Headband’, but she also wrote ‘Loser Like Me’. Michele’s ability to totally inhabit both of these Rachels blows my mind.

The Rachel of Seasons 4 and 5—the bad dance movie years—has very little charm for me. I think that so much of the poignancy of Glee comes from the threat of social and professional mediocrity which haunts these kids. Seeing Rachel heartbroken but determined to survive, strutting through Manhattan with a hot pink suitcase, at the very end of Season 3 was very moving for me; the slick, professionalised, mature, non-ridiculous Rachel of Season 4 was not. Sending her back to Lima for Season 6 made a strange kind of sense—emotional sense, you understand, not narrative sense—and gave me a few final moments with the starry-eyed uptight loser I originally fell in love with.

TA: I think Georgia’s reading of Glee in terms of failure is perfect, and certainly helped me understand why I too believe that Rachel had to be number one on this list. Her return to Lima in Season 6, after the premature collapse of both a Broadway and a television career, made Glee meaningful again (albeit momentarily). In fact, it actually made the New York wilderness years seem almost worthwhile. There’s something very poignant, very tragic and very contemporary about this overall arc, which has its originary moment with the iconic performance of ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ at the end of the first episode. This injunction to excessive, superhuman resilience is wrapped up intimately with the disappointment of New York (Rachel sings it for her Funny Girl audition, through which her ultimate fantasy is prematurely realised and its insufficiency revealed), but it is equally wrapped up with her relationship with Finn (she sings it at the end of Season 1, after he declares his love). One might imagine that, at one point, there was a possible six-season arc in which Rachel, disillusioned with stardom, comes home to discover that, all along, her ‘real’ destination had been in the arms of her soul mate Finn. This wasn’t to be, though, and underneath Season 6’s orgy of matrimony and reconciliation, there remained this tension (which was far more interesting): what could Rachel do next? What was there left for her to ‘believe’ in so vehemently, when all the obvious goals (winning at Nationals, stardom, her One True Pairing) had been removed one by one? (And here, the character of Rachel dissolves into the actor who plays her: what next for Lea? What strange ironies are we seeing played out here, consciously or not?)

In Glee, Rachel plays out the relatively well-trodden, Romantic myth of striving to achieve one’s dreams, but this is appended to/realised through a more contemporary myth: what Robin James talks about as ‘the discourse of resilience’ (the ‘new neoliberal feminine ideal’). This is the point at which the virtuosic self-possession of ‘Don’t Rain On My Parade’ or ‘Maybe This Time’ gives way to the more volatile excess of ‘Firework’ or ‘Defying Gravity’. So much of the pop music of the period during which Glee was made entered into this discourse, and it found its way into the show through Rachel. What’s more, her tenure on the show lasted long enough for us to see quite clearly the insufficiency of resilience and superhuman self-motivation on their own, as a strategy for living. The care that the characters extend to each other, and the solidarity of the choir room, is far more valuable. There is no New York. There is no LA. There is nothing outside Lima.

The penultimate episode of Glee concludes with a flashback of the original ‘Don’t Stop Believing’ performance. It would have been a far more effective conclusion to the series than the gross, anticlimactic finale. It sums up the key message of the show for me (a message that its creators only half-endorsed), that all this striving and soaring only leads in circles, and that what the kids were really ‘believing in’, back in the first episode, was nothing more or less than the value of the performance itself: singing together, in an empty auditorium, for the sake of it.