Glee. Just…Glee. I’ve posted in the past about watching great shows to improve your writing (and because they’re awesome and we love good stories). I’ve been a fairly long-standing fan of Ryan Murphy (and later Brad Falchuk). The Shield, Nip/Tuck, American Horror Story. Good shows. Great characters.
But, Glee. I’ve watched it on Netflix and my becoming enamored with it started one boring, cold Saturday morning. I turned it on. I gasped. I laughed. I called to my teenage daughter to get in there because I was watching the best television show I’d ever seen and she had to see it.
I’ve fallen in love with the characters because they’re so not perfect. They make mistakes, they’re human and flawed. But they’re real and they grow, so I care about them. And, I think I’ve learned from this show, antagonist or protagonist, what matters is to make your characters realistic, to have strengths and flaws, to make them stretch and grow into more than they were when they began.
Aside from being a writer, from the perspective of being someone who messes up and deals with the fact that sometimes life sucks, from the perspective of a parent of a child who has been bullied and is a minority, I love that this show is about loving the “loser” that we all are. I don’t know who coined the phrase “let your freak flag fly,” but I live by it and I wish that in finding the things about ourselves that make us unique and special (and unicorns), we’d learn to embrace those things in other people.