I’ve been getting back into watching Glee recently. I stopped watching the show after the first season when the kids were always going to one singing competition or another, or always breaking up and getting back together again, or always being beautiful "outcasts" with blonde hair.

But there’s something fascinating about watching cardboard cut-outs being moved around a screen.

For the record, Ryan Murphy is an emotionally bankrupt show creator. I don’t mean that regarding his personal life, but the two shows of his I’ve watched are emotionally lifeless. The characters have no specific will or agency unless it’s a far-flung, single-minded pursuit (like Rachel Berry’s hunger for fame on Glee). Their relationships are flat and are motivated by nothing, seemingly, but Murphy’s need to make the characters move from point A to point B. Christian Troy and Sean McNamara on Nip/Tuck are supposed to have been friends for their entire lives, but their chemistry onscreen is zilch. Worst of all, viewers have to hate, hate, hate them, and are sickened by their lives and their antics.

Then why do we watch? I truly cannot explain the addictive nature of these shows.

Recently, I’ve been watching Murphy’s lame attempt to give Glee’s Sue Sylvester some humanity on this show. In the first season, she was given a sister with Down’s Syndrome named Jean. Sue was loving and caring to her sister, and even let a high school girl with Down’s Syndrome be a member of her cheerleading team because the girl reminded her of Jean.

In the second season, Jean died. The glee club crew steps in and, really awkwardly, offers to clear out Jean’s things from her nursing home. Sue tells them that she hates having them there, but she wants people at Jean’s funeral. At the funeral itself, Sue reads a speech that I’m sure Murphy calibrated to make Sue more sympathetic, but she can’t finish reading, so glee club’s coach, Will Schuester, steps in to finish reading it while Sue cries. Then the kids sing that song about “Anything you want to do, do it” from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, and Sue thanks them. It should have been all weird and subverted, but, goddamnit, the kids cry and Sue says thank you.

Bullshit.

For one, you cannot give a character emotional complexity by having her be a totally underdeveloped villain who tries to ruin the glee club in every episode, and then have her be redeemed, even partially, by loving a mentally handicapped sister. It’s like having Snidely Whiplash from the cartoon Dudley Do-Right of the Mounties kiss a gentle and kind pet bunny before he tries to run Dudley over with a train. It doesn't explain or forgive his vile actions. Sue's few minutes of weeping at her sister does not a complicatedly motivated character make; instead, the funeral itself seems like some kind of weird hoax where the glee club kids can walk into an open coffin or something.

Do you think that Sue’s relationship with her sister makes her more complex?