A Plea to ‘Glee’

I was going to write about Castle, Lone Star, and The Event today since they all premiered last night, but unfortunately I had to DVR them for today. I’ll still planning to talk about them at some point, since two of those three are brand new shows. So instead for today, I want to talk about something that’s been bugging me since the spring: Glee‘s marketing and promotion.

Yes, I do love Glee and am pretty excited about the new season starting up tonight, but I don’t find the show to be without issue. My biggest problem since the beginning of the show’s rise to fame, has been the spoiler-ridden promotion. I, like many others, used to be obsessed with hunting down spoilers for all my favorite shows. I have since given that up, because I realized that it made watching the show really boring since I knew what was going to happen. So now I’m pretty hyper about avoiding spoilers since I don’t want it to ruin my viewing experience. One of my favorite things about Glee was the surprise of what songs they were going to sing each week and what (if any) surprise guest might they have. Unfortunately show’s definition of “spoiler” seems to be very loose. They release pretty much all the songs in advance, so there’s no surprises there. They also hype up every guest star they sign or any special episodes they’re doing. It’s so bad that going into this new season, I already feel like I know what 80% of episodes are going to be.

Obviously promoting the show without having music in the promos is a bad decision. If I were heading up their promotional department, I’d pick some popular songs that I knew were going to be in the show, and use VERY short snippets of them for dramatic effect instead of releasing an entire album of the songs. The albums shouldn’t be released until after all the songs have been aired – the same goes for the single song releases. Since the show uses songs as a means of progressing the plot or dealing with emotions, a lot of the time you can guess what might be going on plot-wise too. I think they need to take cues from shows like 30 Rock and Grey’s Anatomy. Both those shows have no problem revealing future guest stars, and showing juicy promos, but it’s still difficult to guess what the plot is going to be – they leave the element of surprise intact.

All that being said, I am still greatly anticipating tonight’s premiere. I’m excited to hear the new music in context, and learn some new things about the characters. Mostly, I’m pleased for the return of Sue Sylvester to the airwaves. She always makes me laugh and is definitely my favorite character on the show (although Kurt and Kurt’s dad are both close seconds). So yes, Glee marketing team, I will still watch your show tonight, but I wish you would be more considerate about your music and press releases – some of us still like surprises!