‘Glee’ is too terrible to love, too good to hate

A copy desk colleague went home sick about 6 a.m. on a recent Thursday, complaining of stomach pains and other discomfort. I wanted to spend that morning writing my review of PIXELJUNK SHOOTER 2 for the afternoon’s paper, but because we suddenly needed someone to put together the national news page, I shelved the column and started pulling wire stories.

Like clockwork, my 13-year-old newspaper software suite stroked out. I could use Firefox and the handful of other programs that still run on the Pentium 4-powered piece of shit tethered to my desk, but my page design tool was kaput until our in-house Windows 2000 wizard could diagnose the issue.

The only other machine with the program I needed was the sick guy’s. I haphazardly wiped down his desk, plugged in my own mouse and keyboard and got to work.

You see where this is going, right?

I pooped and shivered like a maniac Friday night, the first evening of what was meant to be an unapologetically selfish long weekend before 12 straight days of meetings and seminars. The plan had been to play DRAGON AGE II all day Friday and to get sauced with friends before the Dropkick Murphys show in D.C. Saturday, but I felt too miserable to enjoy the former and too queasy to attempt the latter.

(A traitorous piece of me had been egging the illness on in hopes that I could simply skip the show and avoid all those people. That piece — that reclusive, vote-courting conspirator — got its wish.)

So, between heavy doses of Pepto, Motrin and other over-the-counter meds, I queued up the most diverting programming I had access to — on this particular Saturday, back episodes of “Doctor Who,” “The Daily Show,” “Top Chef” and, when I bumed out on those, “Glee.”

Lots and lots of “Glee.”

“Glee” is exasperating. At its best, the show is a sensitive, sharp-witted dramedy that wears its heart on its sleeve and a derringer on its hip. But much, much more often, “Glee” is contradictory, brutally stupid, emotionally careless and very boring.

To get to the good stuff — the musical numbers, which are more hit than miss, and the occasional moments when people aren’t treating each other like garbage — you have to wade through dozens of minutes (and sometimes whole episodes) of poorly plotted backstabbing and after-school-special treacle. It’s horrible. The great-to-crap ratio is crushing enough to make you stand up and start cleaning something.

So why did I watch episode after infuriating episode of this nightmare that Saturday, and why did I keep welling up? I almost never cry, and on the unpredictable occasions when I do, I’m not a blubberer. But when I watch “Glee,” my eyes get hot and damp and blinky.

I get grouchy when I’ve been tricked, and I often feel tricked by “Glee.” Per SOP, I want to hate the show and tell everybody about the grudge I’m holding against it. I want to de-friend and block it on Facebook but unblock it occasionally so that I can see if it’s dating anyone else.

But I can’t hate “Glee.”

The show, which follows a gaggle of moody, hormonal choir kids at an Ohio high school, debuted in 2009 to suffocating hype, though I don’t think anybody predicted it would become the primetime phenomenon it is today. I watched the pilot, which was teased that April and re-aired in September, with guarded optimism. It had some tonal issues, landing somewhere between “Kids Incorporated” and “Boston Legal” on the zany morality spectrum, and the overwritten putdowns didn’t always stick, but that first episode dialed into something fundamental about the way I grew up.

As an elementary school kid, I spent dozens of afternoons and weekends reading back issues of EGM from the cheap seats at York Little Theatre, where my mom often pitched in as a rehearsal pianist. Try as I did to focus on mind-blowing promises about the next EARTHWORM JIM or DONKEY KONG COUNTRY, my brain went rogue, osmotically gobbling up entire librettos for a ton of musicals — “Fiddler on the Roof,” “The Fantasticks,” “Jesus Christ Superstar,” what have you. I later joined the theater’s pit orchestra on french horn for a few shows, including “Camelot,” “Crazy for You,” “Annie Get Your Gun” and “Peter Pan.”

Showtunes rocked my world at an especially formative moment. They defined my entire musical sensibility. I still love huge, layered, upbeat sounds, which probably accounts for my preoccupation with ska and swing and electro-pop and eight- or nine-piece indie bands.

I loved performing, too, although I ran away from it as quickly as possible when it became uncool and difficult. That haunts me. I still can play the valves off a trumpet and sing like a motherfucker, but no one’s ever heard me do it. You might have caught me warbling in falsetto here and there, but the only place I take deep breaths and belt high B-flats with a full-on vibrato is the shower. That’s stupid.

I also live in the same bullfuck burg where I grew up, and I’m losing more of myself every time I have to parley with any of the angry, provincial fucks who populate the place. I should leave, but my job and benefits are too good to walk away from, and I live with three great dogs in a nice house with a big fence. I’m 27 and I feel like my life is over.

For those reasons and others, the essential promise of “Glee” — that a dozen prodigiously talented kids could simply sing their way past shitty circumstances and leave their awful hometown — was and is wholly intoxicating.

To its credit, the show delivers on that hook in two major ways.

The musical moments are dead-on often enough to look forward to. When the show tackles something too big — its Britney Spears and Lady Gaga and “Rocky Horror” episodes, for instance — or when it throws too much responsibility at a guest star, things fall apart. But when it trusts its frankly incredible young cast with a song that lends itself to adaptation, I get chills.

(The show has the actors loop their vocals in the studio, and I think that’s a mistake. But these voices belong to these ladies. And the shiny post-production treatment makes for some killer singles.)

“Glee” also delivers for gays, most often when it’s illustrating the never-ending horror our tribe goes through in high school. No matter how many people you have rooting for you, you’re never totally safe. And when you’re the only gay person you know, the trauma is magnified.

I was called “fag” and “queer” so often by bigger kids that I assumed everybody knew my situation by the time I finished high school, but I didn’t properly come out until I was 22. In that respect and several others, I don’t really identify with Kurt (Chris Colfer, who’s terrific), the only openly gay teenager at McKinley High. Kurt’s fabulous, but there’s nothing fabulous about me, and I’ve never spoken in that high-pitched theatrical lilt the gays seem to love so much. You couldn’t suss out my inner queen just by talking to me.

And as awful as York Suburban could be, it was nothing compared to cartoonishly perilous McKinley, where a bully can brutalize a kid in front of dozens of students and staff every day without so much as a suspension.

Still, the isolation and exhaustion and tiny moments of relief you see on Colfer’s face are entirely recognizable. Kurt and I might have nothing in common, and we might not even inhabit the same universe, but we’ve grappled with some of the same issues.

About a third of the way into the current season, Kurt spies on a rival glee club at a nearby private school, which enforces a zero-tolerance policy on bullying. While gathering intelligence, Kurt stumbles across Blaine (Darren Criss), who leads the rival club and who also happens to be *ding* *ding* *ding* gay! And he likes sports and talks like a real person, so he’s, like, normal! He even took Kurt by the hand and ran with him in slow-motion only seconds after they met OHMIGOSH.

It’s a moment so ham-fisted, contrived and fantastical (show me this school’s real-world analogue) that it’s almost impossible to watch, but Kurt’s shock and ensuing infatuation feel totally authentic, thanks largely to Colfer’s honest read and Criss’ ferocious half-Filipino eyebrows. (For what it’s worth, I lived with a half-Filipino rockstar for a few months in Van Nuys, and I can confirm that they’re just as attractive in real life.)

So when Blaine started belting “Teenage Dream” with his lame a capella henchmen, I rolled with it.

But even with Kurt, the show’s one consistently sympathetic character, “Glee” finds scores of ways to fuck up. The worst of these offenses, as Todd Van Der Werff noted at the A.V. Club earlier this season, was the ridiculous revelation that the football player terrorizing Kurt is a closeted, self-loathing gay, and the tacit suggestion that, in the real world, this sort of stuff goes on all the time.

In my experience, which is strictly observational, that’s never the case. Bullies are sadists, pure and simple. The reason they give people shit is because they like to do that. They don’t want to know their prey or win their affection or secretly date them. They want to squash and hurt.

Bad as that miscalculation is, the show’s repertoire of problems is so much larger. There’s the relentless employment and membership shuffle, which nets “Glee” lesser dramatic returns every single episode. Teachers and coaches are hired and fired with dizzying frequency, and the kids leave and rejoin the glee club, cheerleading squad and football team just as often.

Without exception, “Glee” tries to mine these stories for suspense. Holy fuck, Jane Lynch’s ridiculous, ridiculous character has replaced Principal Figgins! Oh shit, she fired Mr. Schuester! Will he come back in time to lead the glee club to victory at sectionals? Wait, he already did? What’s happening?

Entire plot arcs are hatched, executed and forgotten in the space of two or three commercial breaks. We’re asked to suspend disbelief so often and so emphatically — people break into each other’s houses at least once an episode, usually provoking nothing more than a “whaa how’d you get in here” and a throwaway punchline — that taking the show seriously becomes impossible.

And “Glee” wants us to take it seriously as often as it doesn’t.

There are ways around this, and though they aren’t the stuff of great art, I don’t think “Glee” aspires to be great art. Go meta. Enjoy your elaborate sets (what public school can afford this stuff?), your wildly inconsistent characters, your useless supporting cast, your magically appearing and disappearing band and your fucking slushies, but acknowledge and make fun of the way you lean on this bullshit. Make it a joke, and call attention to it.

“Glee” likely won’t become the show so many of its champions want it to be, but it does a handful of things extraordinarily well, and its heart seems to be in the right place. Even when I’m shaking my head or fast-forwarding out of embarrassment, I can’t help but root for the thing. I care about some of these weirdos. I want to grab Kurt by the shoulders and tell him that high school, shitty as it is, will end one day, and that he’s going to put on 50 pounds of muscle when he graduates and that people are going to leave him alone, more or less. “It” doesn’t get better — not really, and not ever — but he will.

So, um … you should, uh …

Ugh.

You should watch it. There.