This is a basic how-to guide from Charlie Brooker.

Well happy holidays everyone. I caught this sweet video on YouTube from Sesame Street. Sesame street was certainly not this cool when I was a kid…

Or maybe it was, and I was just too young to know it.

So, I caught the latest episode of the new Fox series Glee tonight. Last week’s premiere got off to somewhat of a rough start, but after getting settled I found myself curious to see more.

After tonight’s episode, I’m not sure I’ll be tuning in again.

The elements I thought were the pilot’s strongest points, the musical numbers, have here become awkwardly drawn out and cringe-worthy (the rendition of Kanye West’s Gold Digger with the rapping teacher was particularly hard to watch.) When a song was chosen for comedic effect, it ran too long and spoiled what could have been a good gag. I can’t help but think that Glee would be better as a half-hour, with these sequences cut down heavily.

Despite these issues, there are some good moments – Principal Figgins, played by veteran actor Iqbal Theba, is a fun character with some great lines, and there are some funny “Cut-To’s” throughout.

At this point,  it just doesn’t seem like Glee is living up to the hype.

After being bombarded for weeks on end by promo after promo after promo, tonight was finally the night: the  ’special preview episode’ of the new Fox series Glee (the show premieres next week.)

Thanks to these promos, in the lead up to tonight I  had crafted an admittedly delusional mental image of what this show might be – Arrested Development in a high school Glee club. My hopes were high.

The first couple of acts proved to be an adjustment period, to say the least. I was distracted at first by the similarities to Election – the blended-source narration, the desperate-to-achieve outcast schoolgirl, the singing jock tapping into his sensitive side – and I also struggled a bit to discern who’s story this was. But as the show played on I got more comfortable in the world and found myself completely caught up by the end.

The writing at times seemed a little ’surface’, and some of the dialogue too ‘on the nose’, but the great cast of new faces and old favorites and the incredible music (most notably the cast’s rendition of Journey’s Don’t Stop Believing that closed the episode) more than made up for it.

So is Glee the new classic it’s been billed as? It’s still too soon to tell.

Will I be watching to find out? Most definitely.

"WE ARE!!"

It is official: Broken Forty will be at BANFF in June to pitch our TV comedy series BIG DREAMS.

We’ve got a hell of a lot of work to get done in the weeks to come and you can read about it all here.

We are extremely excited to be attending one of the world’s premiere Television markets and hope to make good use of it. We are hard at work perfecting our Bible and Pilot script, designing and printing promotional materials and constantly practicing our pitch on friends and family. The road to Banff has been rocky thus far, but if we can make it through this without being banished from the industry, we believe Broken Forty will make it’s mark in 2009.