It can really be overbearing, can’t it? The fact is, these kids don’t have a ton of time to practice and rehearse several new songs every week to perfection. Autotune gives them a tremendous amount of slack in that regard. I don’t watch anymore because of its overuse - but some people really don’t mind it.
I read an interview with Darren Criss, who plays Blaine on the show, and he mentioned that the main cast of Glee often has less than an hour, sometimes less than half an hour, in the studio for each song. He said he’s been luckier in that regard as the vocals for the other members of his character’s choir are provided by the Tufts University men’s a capella group, so he has to fly out to the East Coast to record with them and generally has a day or two before returning to LA for shooting. He did say that on at least one occasion he’d finished recording a song, flown back across country, and shot the scene featuring that song all in under 24 hours, though.
The autotuning does annoy me, but a lot of contemporary popular music sounds overproduced to me. The music on Glee doesn’t stand out to me as being worse than other contemporary pop in that way, although I might feel differently if I listened to more new music.
They’re cranking out an album’s worth of music every two weeks, squeezed into filming a one hour show that features at least one big dance number an episode. They must serve amphetamines for lunch on that set.
I’m just one of those people who finds auto-tune unspeakable annoying, both for what it does to the quality of the voice and what it says about the level of the singer. Once I notice its presence, I can’t ignore it and I can no longer enjoy anything about the performance.