Miss Calif. Should Watch Glee, Not Tyra

I used to really like
that show
Popular.

Set in a high school where people were blunt and hilarious and
mean and at times flat-out not-of-this-earth in a way you never
see on television. Like there was a girl on the show who lived
in a restroom stall. Stuff like that. But it went away, and
then for some reason I never watched creator Ryan Murphy's
other stuff. I've never seen an episode of
Nip/Tuck.

I hear it's good. Only so many hours in the day, etc. That's my
catchall excuse for not watching something people talk about a
lot. But I've already seen the first episode of
Glee

.

I saw it because I'm on
the Fox mailing list for some reason and, in addition to the
American Idol

gumball machine I've abandoned to the thrift store, I get
advance DVDs from them. If you watched television for a living,
you'd get this sort of thing in the mail too. You'd also get
Kiefer Sutherland action figures. Those are funny. His plastic
face is all "TERRORISM!"

Secondly, I like the
name
Glee.

It weeds out the audience right from the start.

And then there's the
whole thing about it being
Popular

but with singing. Maybe a little -- OK, a LOT -- sweeter than
Popular.

And in just the right way it's also the kind of corny that
would be deadly in the wrong hands. The kind where you feel
sort of like a dork for admitting that you're watching it.
Because by the time you get to the end of the first episode (it
airs after the
Idol

finale in a couple weeks) and they sing that Journey song --
and no, that's not too much of a spoiler, because you see them
doing it in the commercial -- if you're even the least bit
susceptible to being in love with a goofy TV show, then you're
going to be in it real hard. And then what? We have to wait
until fall for the rest of it? That's my only beef at the
moment. It's going in my TiVo regardless, but dang. I can catch
up on the rest of those
Mad Men

episodes this summer, I suppose.

Speaking of TiVo, mine
died. So everything I normally watch for this column got eaten.
I planned to check out
Tyra

's "Gay Kingdom" episode, which is part of her ongoing
"social experiment" series. Have you seen any of these yet?
They're like if a bunch of fifth-graders studied sociology and
had to do a show-and-tell project with people they recruited
based on their propensity for engaging in constant
malapropism.

Fortunately, I found it
all on YouTube, and what I learned is that everyone is
xenophobic and stupid and that all varieties of queers hate
each other. Except Hedda Lettuce, who just hates not being the
center of attention. Tyra, oddly enough, found her panel of
gays (a lipstick lesbian, a butch lesbian, a feminine gay guy,
a masculine gay guy, a bisexual guy, a transgender woman, and
Hedda Lettuce) to be somewhat reactionary and conservative and
called them on it, before wondering aloud why all you ever see
on TV are feminine lesbians and feminine gay men.

Answer for the CEO of
Bankable Productions: Straight men still run television.