Glee may have hit a ratings high, but the popular show has hit a new low in terms of story. Jace Lacob on where the Fox musical-comedy has gone horribly, offensively wrong. 
 
 From a ratings standpoint, Fox’s musical-comedy Glee is on a roll. 
 
 The show has managed to break its own records with this week’s Britney Spears-themed installment, which attracted 13.3 million viewers. Those are massive numbers in this fragmented media age. 
 
 But even as Glee continues to steamroll the competition, it’s increasingly apparent what’s being lost as the show piles on the musical numbers, gimmicky guest stars, and theme episodes: Plot, characterization, and logic fly out the window. 
 
 And while Glee might be one of the more inventive broadcast-network offerings in recent years because of its format, it’s also at times the safest, a show that’s more concerned that it will confuse the audience with things like serialization or three-dimensional characters than delivering a consistent narrative experience. 
 
 Following the trend established in the latter half of its freshman season, after two episodes of Season 2, Glee’s characters are still little more than archetypes. Rachel (Lea Michele) hasn’t been expanded beyond her self-absorbed bitchiness; Finn (Cory Monteith) is little more than a void with a haircut; Kurt (Chris Colfer) is fabulous but one-note; and second-tier characters like Mercedes (Amber Riley), Tina (Jenna Ushkowitz), and Artie (Kevin McHale) rarely get a line of dialogue, much less a meaningful storyline these days. And don’t even get me started on Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), the preening man-boy with a penchant for rapping and embarrassing dance moves. 
 
 Meanwhile, creators Ryan Murphy, Ian Brennan, and Brad Falchuk have stolen some of Sue Sylvester’s bite. Whereas Sue (Jane Lynch) initially was a major antagonist of the glee club, she’s been undone by cheap attempts to give some shading to her loathsome character in the forms of a mentally disabled sister and Becky (Lauren Potter), a cheerleader with Down syndrome who flutters about Sue like a bespectacled Tinkerbell. 
 
 I’m not sure what to make of newly installed mannish football coach Shannon Beiste (Dot-Marie Jones), clearly intended to become a new adversary for both Will and Sue, but who has already been reduced to a saccharine storyline about her self-esteem—she is a crying child inside a beast’s body. Her oddness might be an effort to make Sue seem more grounded. Or it’s just a Ryan Murphy trope about twisted exteriors that viewers of his Popular and Nip/Tuck find queasily familiar. (Both shows went off the rails creatively.) 
 
 Worse, while rough edges have been intentionally shaved off of Sue Sylvester, the supporting characters have become even more egregiously offensive, but none more so than Jacob Ben-Israel (Josh Sussman), a.k.a. “Jew-Fro.” 
 
 The handling of the character—here presented as a sweaty, stammering, and compulsively masturbating Jew—borders on the anti-Semitic. Is it a case of Kosher panic? Or another symbol of that eternal Glee crutch: the use of stereotype as shorthand for character development? Either way, the butt sweat stains, over-the-top hairstyle (“It’s like a Jewish cloud,” cooed Brittany), self-pleasuring during the pep rally performance, and his attempt to actually buy Rachel from Finn are in shockingly poor taste, considering the series’ self-professed messages about acceptance and equality. 
 
 Instead of illustrating the unspoken and inner desires or fears of the characters, the songs here seem like coldly calculated viral videos, designed to rapidly spread across the Internet. 
 
 • Watch the Six Best Moments from the Britney Glee Episode 
 
 
 
 • Itay Hod: Glee’s New Villain(It’s also another indication of the often-contradictory nature of the series itself, one that vacillates between the cheesy and the caustic, sometimes in the same scene.) 
 
 What is Glee doing when other shows would be moving forward, or showing their characters in challenging, or funny, situations? Well, Glee has become a music single-delivery mechanism. Scenes involving dialogue or plot development are shoehorned between massive musical set pieces, which draw from the vast and varied world of popular music. Instead of illustrating the unspoken and inner desires or fears of the characters, the songs here seem like coldly calculated viral videos, designed to rapidly spread across the Internet. ||||| Photo by Dave Thompson/Getty Images 
 
 British authorities have identified a suspect in what appears to have been a suicide bombing and an act of terrorism outside an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England on May 22. Details are still emerging, but as of late Monday night, authorities had confirmed 19 people dead and more than 50 injured. 
 
 The victims of Monday’s bombing will almost certainly be mostly girls and women. The Grande fan demographic also includes a number of older millennial women, gay men, and general lovers of pop music, of course, but her live concerts are largely populated by tween and teenage girls and their moms. By staging the attack at a Grande show, the perpetrator or perpetrators chose to target children who may or may not have had an adult around to help them through an emergency situation. 
 
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 And they targeted fans of an artist whose global brand is one of blissful, unsubdued feminine sexuality. Grande has long been the target of sexist rhetoric that has deemed her culpable for any sexual objectification or animosity that’s come her way. Her songs and wardrobe are sexy, yet she’s maintained a coy, youthful persona; the combination has led some haters to argue that she’s made her fortune by making people want to have sex with her, so whatever related harm befalls her is entirely her fault. 
 
 Like her pop-superstar predecessor Britney Spears, Grande has advanced a renegade, self-reflexive sexuality that’s threatening to the established heteropatriarchal order. If the Manchester bombing was an act of terrorism, its venue indicates that the attack was designed to terrorize young girls who idolize Grande’s image. Terrorism works by making people afraid to go about their daily lives, doing the things that make them feel human and whole: going to work, shopping at the mall, traveling by plane, dancing to Latin music at a gay club, singing along to a fun pop tune that lets young women envision themselves as powerful, sexual beings. All concertgoers whose nights ended in panic or tragedy on Monday will suffer some degree of post-traumatic consequences in the coming months and years. But the teens and children in the audience, who are still in the middle of developing their conceptions of themselves and the world, may find those notions irrevocably altered.
– Based on the 13.3 million viewers who watched this week’s much-anticipated “Britney Spears episode,” everyone loves Glee—everyone, that is, except Jace Lacob. “As the show piles on the musical numbers, gimmicky guest stars, and theme episodes,” he writes in the Daily Beast, “plot, characterization, and logic fly out the window.” Forget “serialization,” “three-dimensional characters,” or “a consistent narrative experience:” Glee is simply “a music single-delivery mechanism … the very definition of mass-produced entertainment that’s intended to distract even as it asks you to hit download on iTunes.” Its “characters are still little more than archetypes”—sometimes offensively so, as in the case of one Jewish supporting character whose characterization “borders on the anti-Semitic.” The “massive musical set pieces” that distract you from the lack of character or plot development “seem like coldly calculated viral videos, designed to rapidly spread across the Internet.” But that’s probably why people love Glee, with its never-ending covers of songs that are “part of the pop-culture lexicon already.” To Lacob, it’s just “a cottage industry of mass-produced knockoffs.” (If, after reading this, you're still obsessed with all things Glee, check out Lea Michele's near-topless photo shoot for Marie Claire.)