I’ve finally gotten around to starting to watch GLEE on Netflix, and after a handful of episodes I have a question.
Re: the woman who runs the cheerleading program
I listen to the way she talks about the kids in the glee club, and her downright bullying, popularity-driven attitude, and I have to ask: Is she simply desperate to preserve her cheerleading program’s funding, or is she really that juvenile?
Both?
Early in the show Coach Sue did seem genuinely concerned about protecting her program, but this becomes much less of an issue as the series progresses. Over time she finds other reasons to oppose the glee club, such as having been insulted by club members or some of her cheerleaders missing a competition to participate in a glee club event, but generally it seems that once she latched onto the idea of destroying the glee club she never really let it go. She seems to be mostly driven by spite. In later episodes she does sometimes side with the glee club, but in time she reverts back to being their enemy. It doesn’t always make a lot of sense, but this is really one of the smaller things you just have to swallow if you’re going to watch this show.
Both.
Sue is the glee club’s antagonist both because she thinks athletics are more important than art programs, and because she doesn’t approve of the accepting nature of the glee club/Will Schuester. Also she’s a bit of a sadist.
it is easier to watch Glee if you accept that the story serves better as a backdrop to the songs than something that makes sense.
Exactly. Think of her as a plot device (and medium for one-liners) rather than a character.
A’ight, thanks. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of the show so far, I just thought Sue seemed a bit “off”.
This is good advice for most of the show. The plots sometimes serve no purpose other than to string together songs or provide a medium for one liners. Don’t expect consistency from characters or realistic plots or for anything to make much sense from one minute to the next.
And, God Forbid, don’t start wondering how a school that doesn’t have money to pay the Glee Coach has money to make it rain on stage 
But its fun if you let go that it has any relation to reality or expect any level of consistency.
My advice for new Glee viewers is that this show is about 30% good (including a few of the finest moments I’ve seen on television), 30% reasonably entertaining, 30% awful, and 10% sheer madness. And that’s usually all within a single episode. So the deal you have to make if you’re going to watch this show is that you’ll put up with the bad parts (some of them very bad indeed) for the good parts.
IMO, the first half of the first season is pretty great. It begins to decline from there, and drops off steeply after season two.
Those first 13 episodes were produced before the show began to air. Once the show was a big hit, the writers seemed to take the characters–who were all quirky and slightly cartoonish to begin with–and “dial them up to 11,” exaggerating their goofiness to ridiculous extremes.
As others have said, don’t try to evaluate the show based on any relationship to reality.
You’re going to be asking a lot more questions about glee by the time you are finished with the show.
Including, starting early in S2, “Why am I still watching this”?
Although since he’s coming to it after it’s already been on the air for several seasons, he won’t have to wait as long as we did to learn that some of these questions are eventually answered on the show. Glee isn’t consistent even in its inconsistency, and on more than one occasion an episode has referred back to an old plot point that had been totally dropped for months, even years.
LOL 
We’ll see. I haven’t watched any further episodes since I made my OP, but that’s just because I’ve been otherwise occupied. I’ll keep watching until it stops entertaining me.
So anyway, I’m a few more episodes in, and still enjoying it so far. I’m a sucker for good singing, and there’s some damn fine singing here. Also, being a distant relative of President William McKinley (my mother’s maiden name, and my grandmother did the genealogy), I like the setting 
I’m really liking that Emma character, partly because I’m OCD myself and have a weakness for cute redheads, but also because it’s becoming evident that she’s the show’s conscience.
Also, the show is fun to watch when full of beer.
Waitaminnit - S1, Ep6, Sue’s journal…
“about to turn 30”
Goddam, she look more “about to turn 50” to me.
I believe that’s a running joke; she lies about her age more than once on the show.
And everything else: her CIA background, relations with impossibly famous people, etc.. Though it turned out she was actually telling the truth about her parents being professional Nazi hunters, as learned when her mom [Carol Burnett] came to visit
Sue also gets away with physical outbursts and outright acts of physical violence that would get any teacher, regardless of their record, not just immediately fired but probably jailed anywhere in America. You just go with it, at least until you stop.
I plan to watch the next episode, Naked, for the eye candy of the he-Glee members shooting a beefcake calendar, but generally speaking the show hasn’t jumped the shark so much as it’s jumped it at least three times before falling into the tank and being killed, consumed, and twice excreted by the shark. The current season, in which they try to keep all of the “kids” (played by 30-something actors) who’ve graduated in the plot while at the same point adding new ones and minus Matthew Morrison and adding in increasingly ridiculous characters and plot twists, boldly sucks where no series has sucked before.
Sue is simply the cartoon character of every evil gym coach and usually loses her battles in the end. Think of Wile E Coyote with a track suit.
Right down to…
having a graduate who goes to college in another state show up to appear as a major character in the high school’s musical, which you would think would be limited to high school students.
Just think of it as one half variety show, and one half spoof - certainly, the school’s principal is there just for comic relief.
That was my experience. I finish Season 1a on a high note, finished Season 1b feeling bored and then only got about two episodes into Season 2 before dropping the show entirely.