Everything Bad is Good for You

Glee: Silly Love Songs

This episode aired on February 12, 2010, and as usual, the show blew my mind. This show always offers such a variety of emotion and excitement wrapped up in a ball called Glee. As a critic, this show offers such polarity because in one instance there are relationships and real world drama, and the next moment they break out in a song (THAT I KNOW) to demonstrate the passion behind this emotion. I feel as if Glee is one the best shows on television right now because it offers a meeting point where people of all ages can meet somewhere in the middle. Using one word I would describe this show as Diverse; it offers a wide range of entertainment, sometimes adult humor, to silly love humor. I love hearing the different version or arrangements done with songs from today's popular culture like Katy Perry's Firework, Queen's Fat Bottomed Girls, and Michael Jackson's Thriller.

Like many shows in today's program choices, the amount of conflict and stories are becoming more complex; instead of there being one central story, television has evolved into a multi-storylined phenomenon. Author of Everything Bad is Good for you, Steve Johnson, states "The narrative weaves together a collection of distinct strands--sometimes as many as ten, though at least half of the threads involve only a few quick scenes scattered through the episodes" (67). As well as the amount of story lines that are intertwined, dialogue is becoming a more inferential process, rather an arrow pointing to the answer. Just like how people learn rules of video games, the mind is directly forced to do the same with television and fill in the open spaces between scenes and dialogue on a television show (Johnson 77).

The first argument is a personal argument in which a guy named Puck is in love with a girl named Lauren. Ever since they went to sectionals he has wanted to be with her. So from looking at this from the view of the Elements of Argument Book, the claim is a claim of fact. The audience can recognize this because throughout the episode Puck is constantly trying to get this girl's attention and prove to her his love by singing to her, getting her chocolates, and asking her to be his valentine. The scenarios presented are support for this claim that he really does love her. Like this conflict of "love" another conflict arises right off of the bat in which this boy is in love with another boy. Going back to the Puck-Lauren situation, there is this girl names Santana that gets into argument with Lauren fighting over Puck to gain his love back. We can see that this is a typical, everyday, high school related argument. All of these arguments are supported by previous episode's foreshadowing and present scenes. Mostly all of the arguments in this show as a whole are teen related drama, but it is the road getting there that keeps a person's interest.

Glee is a show of many tales demonstrating conflict, yet relating to Everything Bad is Good for You offering a thinking process to place time and events together and make many inferences. Happening in all of these episodes, however in this episode in particular these arguments rise in the same fashion that Johnson describes them in his book, eventually showing little clips throughout the episode to continue the story. These tactics can be applied to many, if not all, television shows proving a complex story line, inferential events, and many claims that are supported. Glee airs on Tuesday night at 8 o'clock PM and it is a MUST that you give it a chance and watch it at least one, you will not regret it.



Johnson, Steven. Everything bad is good for you: how today's popular culture is actually    ----->making us smarter. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005. Print.