‘Glee’ doesn’t deserve the comparisions it gets to ‘High School Musical’. It’s way better than that. Think ‘Election’, ‘Freaks and Geeks’ and ‘Buffy’. With musical numbers. And not one main character who is wholly sympathetic. Everyone is shallow and self-absorbed, pushing their own agenda, even when they coat it in being deep and misunderstood.

Will, the earnest language teacher who takes over running the school’s glee club (think of your own secondary school drama club, but with more jazz hands), thinks he has the best interests of the students at heart, yet singularly fails to notice the jocks are beating up a Marc Jacobs wearing boy every morning. Will’s wife Terri simply can’t see her life is easy compared to her husband’s (and episode 2 contains a line of such stunning shallowness involving deciding whether to have a grand foyer or a sun nook in their new house that I spent the next hour laughing in horror). The other teachers include a counsellor with OCD, a slobby coach and the terrifying coach of the award winning cheerleading squad who effectively rules over the faculty.

The students fare little better. From the precocious and alarmingly spoilt Rachel (clearly modeled on Tracy Flick from ‘Election’), to the quarterback Will pressgangs into the glee club, every kid knows the hierachy of the student body and sets about enforcing it. The cheerleading squad also run the celibacy club, keeping their footballer boyfriends under tight control.

The songs, I’ll admit, veer wildly from brilliant (Gold Digger, or Push It) to sentimental pap. Sometimes this works, such as undercutting Rachel’s rendition of Les Miserables ‘On My Own’ with a montage of how delusional she is about herself, but sometimes the mismatching of song and narrative feel forced and not nearly as funny as the show itself thinks it is.

That jar though, between the upbeat musical numbers and the sarcastic, shallow and petty characters, is what make ‘Glee’ a delight to watch. Any potential mawkishness from a song is instantly undercut by a wonderfully biting line. Yes, ‘Glee’ is a musical comedy, and maybe some viewers will never get past that idea, but the comedy is acid.