GLEE!
Glee is an American musical comedy-drama television series that airs on Fox in the United States, and on Global and Fox Canada in Canada. It focuses on the high school glee club New Directions competing on the show choir competition circuit, while its members deal with relationships, sexuality and social issues. The initial main cast encompassed club director and Spanish teacher Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch), guidance counselor Emma Pillsbury (Jayma Mays), Will's wife Terri (Jessalyn Gilsig), and eight club members played by Dianna Agron, Chris Colfer, Kevin McHale, Lea Michele, Cory Monteith, Amber Riley, Mark Salling and Jenna Ushkowitz. For the second season, formerly recurring cast members Mike O'Malley, Heather Morris and Naya Rivera were promoted to the main cast. For the third season, Harry Shum, Jr. and Darren Criss were promoted from recurring to the main cast, and both Gilsig and O'Malley were removed from star billing, though the latter will again be in the recurring guest cast.
The series was created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, who first conceived Glee as a film. The three write all of the show's episodes and Murphy and Falchuk serve as the show's main directors. The pilot episode was broadcast on May 19, 2009, and the first season aired from September 9, 2009 to June 8, 2010. The second season aired from September 21, 2010 to May 24, 2011, and the third season began airing on September 20, 2011. Glee features on-screen performance-based musical numbers that are selected by Murphy, who aims to maintain a balance between show tunes and chart hits, and produced by Adam Anders. Songs covered in the show are released through the iTunes Store during the week of broadcast, and a series of Glee albums have been released by Columbia Records. The music of Glee has been a commercial success, with over twenty-one million digital single sales and nine million album sales. The series' merchandise also includes DVD and Blu-ray releases, a young adult book series, an iPad application, and a karaoke game for the Wii.
During its first season, Glee received generally favorable reviews from critics, with Metacritic's weighted average based on the impression of 18 critical reviews of 77 percent. The season was nominated for nineteen Emmy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards, six Satellite Awards and fifty-seven other awards, with wins including the 2010 Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy, and Emmy awards for Jane Lynch, guest-star Neil Patrick Harris and Murphy's direction of the pilot episode. In 2011, the show once again won the Golden Globe Award for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy. Jane Lynch and Chris Colfer won Golden Globes for Best Supporting Actress and Best Supporting Actor respectively; Matthew Morrison and Lea Michele also received nominations for Best Actor and Best Actress respectively. The show was also chosen by Fox to fill the coveted timeslot that followed the network's coverage of Super Bowl XLV in 2011. On July 14, 2011, Glee was nominated for twelve Primetime Emmys.
Murphy and Fox have produced a concert film, Glee: The 3D Concert Movie, featuring performance and backstage footage from the 2011 Glee Live! In Concert! tour. The film was directed by Kevin Tancharoen, and began its two-week limited release in the United States on August 12, 2011.
The show's musical performances have been a commercial success, with over twenty-one million copies of Glee cast single releases purchased digitally, and over nine million albums purchased worldwide. In 2009, the Glee cast had 25 singles chart on the Billboard Hot 100, the most by any artist since The Beatles had 31 songs in the chart in 1964; in 2010, it placed 80 singles on the Billboard Hot 100, far outstripping the previous record.In February 2011, Glee surpassed Elvis as the artist with the most songs placed on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, though fewer than one-fourth of them have charted for more than one week. The cast performance of "Don't Stop Believin'" was certified gold on October 13, 2009, achieving over 500,000 digital sales, and on March 16, 2011, received platinum certification for having sales of over a million. The series' cover versions had a positive effect on sales of Rihanna's "Take a Bow" increasing by 189 percent after the song was covered in the Glee episode "Showmance".
However, there has also been critical condemnation of the cast performances, with Jon Dolan for Rolling Stone commenting that Matthew Morrison "couldn't rap his way out of a 98° rehearsal", and Allmusic's Andrew Leahey opining that Cory Monteith and Dianna Agron "can't sing nearly as well as their co-stars". E! Online's Joal Ryan criticized the show for its "overproduced soundtrack", in particular, complaining that many songs rely too heavily on the pitch correcting software Auto-Tune, noting: "For every too-brief moment of Lea Michele sounding raw—and lovely—on a "What a Girl Wants," or Monteith singing a perfectly credible REO Speedwagon in the shower, there's Michele and Monteith sounding like 1990s-era Cher on "No Air," or Monteith sounding like the Monteith XRZ-200 on the out-of-the-shower version of "Can't Fight This Feeling".
During the second season, Rob Sheffield for Rolling Stone noted the Britney Spears and Rocky Horror tribute episodes as examples when he lauded Glee and its choice of music. He praised Murphy for his selection and resurrection of "forgotten" pop songs and compared the show's uniqueness to "MTV in its prime" as the embodiment of popular culture.
Some artists, including Slash, Kings of Leon, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Foo Fighters have declined to have their songs used on the show leaving creator Ryan Murphy unhappy with their decision and often verbally attacking the artists saying they are making a poor decision by not allowing their music on his show.
