American Life

As you might suspect from the title, Glee is pretty happy with itself. It's caught in the same smugly camp cartoon irony mode as Desperate Housewives and Ugly Betty, though so far with no signs of the tedious overcomplications of the former or the unchanging format of the latter. But it shares their black humour and reliance on grotesque female monsters to drive the plot.

In this instance the monster is Jane Lynch's Sue Sylvester, a character somewhere between Heathers, Donnie Darko and The Royal Tenenbaums. All of the cliches of American high school dramas are here: the horny, dumb jocks, the bitchy cheerleaders, the embarrassing nerds, etc. It's amazing how flexible these shorthand tics are: ever since John Hughes, Clueless and Election, the high school has taken over from the Western as the primary metaphor for American life. Here you have hope, fear, laws and lawlessness, emotional distress, cruelty and inspiration, role models and villains, and an endless cast of schoolkids and teachers to draw on for further issues and twists.

At the moment it's great fun – and it knows it. So far my favourite character by far is OCD emotional wreck (and obviously school guidance counsellor) Emma Pillsbury, whose Bridget Jones-style sobbing in a rain-soaked car to All By Myself in a tiny comic aside as she attempts to offer advice to a student did make me yelp with laughter. It's fun and silly and – oh yes, has songs (Goldigger being the only goodie so far) and I'm sure to get bored some way through this season as I always do with these invariably bloated and overlong American seasons.

Interesting to read the slew of homophobic comments from woolly liberals on the Guardian website under a piece about the show a few weeks back – it's like it was an opportunity for a lot of HBO fans to say 'that sounds soooo gay' over and over again. And, frankly, if it's annoying them then it's definitely doing something right.