a taste of poison paradise
(or: october 1’s honey from the hive)
posted at 2:45 pm by brandon in sweet you rock and sweet you roll
cast of Glee — “Toxic” (from Toxic [Glee Cast Version]) — 
Despite my level best efforts over the past five-plus years to change his mind, A thinks television is crass and evil, and has painfully little use for it. (As a child of television and a lifelong fan, this breaks my heart into about thirty-four pieces, but given that we share a gorgeous home which has inside its walls a total of three working flat-screens and a large-screen console, I have nobly managed to navigate past his reticence and get on with my own fandom.) There is, of course, one notable exception to his credo: all action — and I do mean all — grinds to a screeching halt in this house whenever Fox’s demented sophomore smash Glee is on. I’m not sure if it’s the program’s indiscriminate use of song or its brightness-drenched color palette that turns him on so (and I invite him to explicate further in this post’s comments, if he’s so inclined), but I know that I’ve never seen him get so excited about a silly television series — and believe me, I have exposed this man to the medium’s best of the best over the half-decade I’ve known him! — as he does about this one. Personally, even though I can generally take or leave individual episodes of the series, I understand completely why the show is such a sensation — by and large, Glee is a fun, frothy hour of pure escapism, punctuated both by moments of wrenchingly acute emotional power, and of snidely presented, thoroughly over-the-top situations and scenarios, each oddly juxtaposed against the other (sometimes in the same scene!) — and I’m man enough to admit that there are occasions — as in this week’s Britney-centric hour, which found the characters fantasizing about walking a mile in Ms. Spears’ shoes — where the work these people are turning in is so blistering, and so crazily creative, that even my old, cold heart starts to sing.
