Mike Barthel has an excellent essay up about the promise of Glee, a new show which they cruelly piloted last week but won’t be showing until fall.
“…So much of the culture of the 00s was and is tied up with the particular kind of economic prosperity that we can now mark as part of the past, and while the destruction of that culture does not negate the good things that came out of it, such desctruction does make it very hard for pop creators to regard it as normal. Almost every single significant piece of pop culture from the previous part of this decade would, if it were created today, either look very different or much less relevent. Almost everyone on television was affluent–not even middle class, but affluent–and the shiny bliss that 00s pop does so well reeks, as it was intended to do, of money money money….Which is why I liked the first episode of Glee so much: it is the first TV series that’s about this decade rather than a part of this decade. ..”
As usual, Mike takes a pop culture moment and makes me think about it in an entirely new way, which the best cultural critics do. His blogging is sporadic, but definitely worth a visit.
