#i really need to go back and tag this whole convo thread lmao

[tuiyla]

I wonder sometimes if glee was one of the last gasps of TV that wasn’t primarily streaming driven. The another anon made a doctor who comparison and I think that’s apt - that being a show who’s ratings have been so changed by the shift to streaming, something fans never stop arguing about. Game of thrones, maybe, is another? But glee was *so* huge, mainstream wise for five minutes.

Yeah that checks out. Coming to think about it, streaming got bigger and bigger just as Glee ended. Sometimes I think about season 6 and how different the world already was, a contrast to the first season's 2009 immediate post-Obama election vibe.

Doctor Who is a fascinating example because of its longevity but also the fact that it constantly changes, and fans often conflate the reasons behind (lack of) viewership with the show's content. Sometimes it's just the world changing around the show. You'd think something like Doctor Who is uniquely equipped to adapt to that but, well, depends on your perspective how successful that has been.

I think the main reason Glee is hard to compare to another media property is because it was, by all means and despite initial intent, a teen show. GoT with its explicit violence and high fantasy is literally a different world, and so was everything else even nearly as popular. I don't know if I'd say Glee was the most popular teen show of the 2010s but it certainly... occupied a unique space in the mainstream, in the zeitgeist. One that the likes of Gossip Girl or PLL or The Vampire Diaries could never. Maybe it was the musical thing, maybe the dramedy, maybe just this unique cocktail. But it was so insanely ubiquitous and though it did drop off a lot people's radars in later seasons, there's a reason it is still talked about in the mainstream today. The tragedies, yes, the scandals, sure, but also because the grip it had on pop culture never really went away.

Like, when Pitch Perfect came out? Everyone went "oh like Glee." Rachel Bloom, when doing initial promo interviews for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, had to clarify again and again that, not exactly like Glee, these were original songs. Can't imagine what branding Zoey's Extraordinary Playlist must have been like. And then, of course, the teen show right of passage of being compared to Glee in some way or another.