Everyone has seen or at least heard of, the Ryan Murphy Musical Comedy-Drama Glee. Glee aired its pilot episode on May 19, 2009, and has stayed in the media since. The show follows Spanish teacher Will Schuester, Mathew Morrison, as he takes on the school band of misfits, The Glee Club.

   Murphy is known for his anthology series American Horror Story. The program is easily his most popular project, but Glee just doesn’t have the same effect.

    For starters, its main character Rachel Berry is an egotistical musical theatre lover who will stop at nothing to get what she wants. Sounds like a great main character right? Berry is portrayed by Broadway star Lea Michelle and is the top dog in the Glee Club. Over multiple seasons and multiple musical numbers, Berry never learned to share her spotlight, igniting several arguments with the other members of the New Directions. In the show’s second season, audiences are introduced to a talented foreign exchange student, Sunshine, in the bathroom of Mckinley High. Her and Berry duet a version of a Lady Gaga song, and it appears she’s made a new friend. Wrong. She sends Sunshine to a crack house out of jealousy.

    Murphy has been very good at including actors of all backgrounds in the past. Artie Abrams, portrayed by Kevin Mchale, is the exception to that rule. Abrams is a student at Mckinley high who is paralyzed and while Mchale is a very talented singer, he does not require a wheelchair in everyday life. It may be viewed as problematic that Mchale plays a disabled character when he himself is not. There are a plethora of other actors who share the same disability as Abrams and are just as talented as Mchale that could have been cast.

   Sue Slyvester, portrayed by Jane Lynch, is the “villain” of the story. As coach of the Mckinley High cheer team, she makes it her duty to destroy the glee club. In season three, Slyvester takes students from the glee who are considered minorities and creates her new “better” glee club. While it was nice to see another character have a solo other than Rachel, Slyvester continually uses derogatory nicknames to identify each student, calling Tina Cohen-Chang, Jenna Ushkowitz, and Mike Chang, Harry Shum Jr. “Asian” and “Other Asian”.

   Glee has also become known for body shaming in the past few years. In the later seasons, we are introduced to Marley Rose, Mellissa Benoist, an anorexic teen and the daughter of a school lunch lady. Rose joins the glee club but is body-shamed through most of the performances. In season four, after the New Directions lose regionals due to Rose passing out on stage from lack of food, Schuester is more worried about the Glee club losing regionals than his student having an eating disorder. While performing a Katy Perry-themed musical number, Rose decides not to wear the costume chosen for her as she does not feel comfortable in it and promptly gets ridiculed by the boys in the Glee club for being selfish.

   There are many other reasons that this show may be considered problematic. Although the covers of famous musical artists are fun to listen to, this show does a terrible job at handling everyday situations.