Things Only Adults Notice On Glee

Glee debuted to widespread acclaim in 2009. The show's many fans quickly dubbed themselves "Gleeks" and helped propel the show's popularity. While Glee wrapped up its run in 2015, it still lives on in our hearts, with fans old and new alike getting their fix of McKinley High's glee club, New Directions, on Netflix. 

Whether you are a newcomer to the show-stopping series or have been a fan of Glee since it first debuted back in the 2000s, there are a lot of details on this show that you've probably missed — especially if you were a kid when you first watched Glee. The show is filled with quite a few details that might go over the heads of younger viewers, but that are hard to miss for adult fans of the show. Here are some of the things that only adults will notice when watching Glee. Warning: There are some big Glee spoilers ahead.

One of the greatest things about Glee that kids watching the show may take for granted is just how diverse the show is. The fact that the show debuted in 2009 makes its commitment to diverse representation even more notable. William McKinley High School's glee club, New Directions, has members from a variety of ethnic backgrounds, as noted by the Independent. While the portrayals aren't always perfect — such as the only two Asian members, Mike Chang and Tina Cohen-Chang, having nearly the same last name — it's still refreshing to see that the cast of Glee is so diverse. Glee is also a win for LGBTQIA+ representation, and the community is represented through characters like Kurt Hummel, Blaine Anderson, Santana Lopez, and Unique Adams.

Inclusivity is one of Glee's major themes, and the diversity in its cast and storylines back that up. New Directions is all about embracing differences, after all.

Glee brought us some truly outrageous storylines over the years. One of the earliest ones was when Quinn Fabray got pregnant after cheating on her boyfriend Finn Hudson with his best friend, Noah "Puck" Puckerman. In spite of the fact that Finn is a virgin, he somehow believes her lie that he got her pregnant after they fooled around in a hot tub. Granted, Finn is not exactly the brightest member of the glee club, but this is still basic sex ed.

Finn, to his credit, immediately steps up and is determined to support Quinn and to be a good father to her baby. But we kind have to wonder how Quinn possibly thought she could get away with this lie in an era when DNA testing exists. Was her plan to just keep lying to Finn? And did she think that he would never mention to anyone that he supposedly got his girlfriend pregnant without sleeping with her? The lie may have worked on Finn, but there's no way everyone who ever heard this story would have believed it. She must have realized that he would learn the truth at some point, right?

A lot of major topics are handled on Glee, such as bullying, homophobia, and eating disorders. While the members of New Directions are handling a lot of things, we rarely hear anyone talk about going to therapy. We know that Marley Rose gets treatment for her eating disorder, and Rachel Berry and Finn Hudson get couples counseling from the school's guidance counselor, but it would have been nice if Glee had helped to destigmatize mental health and normalize therapy by showing its characters seeking help when they need it.

Rachel, for example, could benefit from therapy throughout the show. She copes with a lot, such as tracking down her birth mother to the death of her high school sweetheart, whom she thought she would one day end up marrying. While she mentions seeing a therapist in passing, it doesn't appear she regularly sees a mental health professional, and Rachel and other New Directions members seem to work out a lot of their problems in glee club. While it's great that the members of New Directions support each other, a song and dance number is not the solution to every problem and is definitely not a replacement for therapy.

With the exception of Sugar Motta, everyone in New Directions on Glee has a great voice. They are never off pitch, they learn harmonies at the drop of a hat, and all seem to read sheet music with ease. They all sound like highly trained singers, but most of them don't seem to have actually formally studied music at any point. Instead, they all appear to be naturally gifted with impressively large ranges, perfect vibrato, and flawless diction.

What's in the water at McKinley High? How are a bunch of teenagers this good without some serious practice? While you would expect most high school glee clubs to need to learn a song over time, the members of New Directions have the ability to just jump in and perform a piece flawlessly instantaneously. It kind of makes you wonder why they need to rehearse at all when they can seemingly learn and perfect songs in just one rehearsal.

When Glee kicks off, Rachel Berry is set up as the underdog. She's nerdy and unpopular, and she's a big contrast to popular cheerleader Quinn Fabray. Rachel's journey to Broadway stardom is supposed to be an inspiring take of overcoming adversity, but she's not really at that much of a disadvantage. First of all, she has two dads who clearly support her and would do anything for her. Rachel comes from a fairly comfortable background and grows up getting everything she could ever want or need. She's also wildly talented and pretty to boot.

She lands one big break after another, from getting most of the solos in glee club to landing a lead role in a Broadway show while she's still in college. It's incredibly hard to root for her at times because she's kind of a diva and can be very rude and toxic, although she does work to become a better person over the course of the show. While it's still exciting to see Rachel make it in the entertainment business, she's far from an underdog and is instead a starlet at the top of her game.

By the end of Glee, most of the characters we met and fell in love with in the early seasons are paired off with their high school sweethearts. Quinn Fabray is with Noah "Puck" Puckerman, Tina Cohen-Chang is with Artie Abrams, Blaine Anderson is married to Kurt Hummel, and Brittany Pierce has wed Santana Lopez. While Glee fans always assumed that Rachel Berry and Finn Hudson would end up together, the untimely passing of Cory Monteith meant that Finn also passed away on the show. Rachel still ended up marrying another of her high school sweethearts though, Jesse St. James.

It's cute that everyone is with their high school sweetheart, but it's also completely unrealistic. What's even more surprising is how young many of our favorite New Directions members were when they got married, tying the knot in their early 20s. High school relationships typically don't have this much staying power, but, then again, the members of New Directions have always done things their own way.

When we first meet Will Schuester on Glee, he's a Spanish teacher at McKinley High. His Spanish is also terrible — so terrible that, at one point, he actually has to enroll in a basic Spanish course to get better at the language (via PopCrush). He later reveals that he became a Spanish teacher because it was the only teaching job he could get, but we have to wonder how he could have landed the position in the first place when it sounds like he got all of his Spanish knowledge from a single Dora the Explorer episode. Will definitely doesn't know enough of the language to be teaching it so why would someone ever hire him?

Thankfully, Will later teaches history — which he is much better at — but it's still kind of strange that he ever taught Spanish. He obviously loves music and working with kids, so it would have made more sense for him to have studied music education in college. By the end of the series, Will finally gets the chance to put his strongest talents to good use and becomes the principal of McKinley High after it is turned into a performing arts school.

Throughout Glee, we see Rachel Berry showing off some pretty killer dance moves. She's been studying dance for most of her life, after all, as she reveals in the show's first episode. She's clearly been poised to become a triple threat her entire life, and she proves over and over on Glee that she can dance, sing, and act.

That's why it's so weird when she gets to NYADA and begins to struggle in her dance class. Granted, part of this is because her teacher, Cassandra July (played by the stunning Kate Hudson), is exceptionally tough on her, telling Rachel that she's not talented and won't make it. Cassandra later reveals that her tough love teaching philosophy was meant to make Rachel work even harder because she saw that Rachel does have what it takes to make it on Broadway. While Rachel may not have been as bad as Cassandra led her to believe, she still wasn't great in her first few dances classes at NYADA, making us wonder how someone with so much dance training could struggle so much.

Why does everyone hate the glee club so much? While many of its initial members like Rachel Berry and Artie Abrams are unpopular, it's hard to believe that people who like to hang out and sing would be so reviled that they are basically at the bottom of the social totem pole. Even after popular kids like jocks Noah "Puck" Puckerman and Finn Hudson and members of the cheerleading squad the Cheerios, including Santana Lopez and Quinn Fabray (played by Naya Rivera, who tragically went missing in July 2020, and Dianna Agron, respectively), join the glee club, the group is still seen as uncool. Its members are teased and constantly have slushies thrown at them.

Teenagers enjoy listening to music — most people do. It's hard to believe that teens would look down on the club as much as they do, especially when they perform popular songs that the student body enjoys hearing. 

When Rachel Berry goes off to college on Glee, she quickly decides that the dorms at NYADA are not for her. When Kurt Hummel decides to move to NYC too, in spite of having been rejected from the school, they decide to go apartment hunting together. The loft in Brooklyn they settle on is gorgeous. It's got plenty of room for two people and is big enough that they can ride their bikes around the space.

We could buy that the two of them would have been able to swing rent on such an apartment back in Ohio, but how are they affording this apartment in one of the most expensive cities in the world? Rachel is in school and Kurt has an internship, and while they both end up working at The Spotlight Diner, it's doubtful they're making enough for rent. As of this writing, the average rent of an apartment in Brooklyn clocks in at a whopping $2,951 (per Rent Café), and an average apartment in the city is only 651 square-feet. While rent may have been a bit lower in the 2010s when Rachel and Kurt scored the apartment, we're still willing to bet that the loft was out of their price range.

For most of Glee, Brittany Pierce is sweet but clueless. She still believes in Santa, doesn't know how to bake because she finds recipes "confusing," and cheats off of another student in math class. She also ends up having to repeat her senior year because she has a GPA of 0.2.

She's later revealed to be a mathematical genius and goes to MIT. Brittany, it turns out, isn't only a once-in-a-generation genius, but her biological dad is actually physicist Stephen Hawking, whose brilliance she seems to have inherited. While Glee throws a lot of implausible storylines at its viewers, this is one of the hardest to digest. While we could certainly believe that Brittany was underperforming in school, it's hard to believe that someone who cheated in math class is, in fact, so gifted at the subject that she is offered early admission to one of the most prestigious schools in the world.

Cheerios coach Sue Sylvester causes a lot of conflict on Glee, and she seems bent on destroying the glee club for much of the series. She later says she was trying to push them to be their best, although we aren't completely buying it. Even if that's true though, Sue is still way too invested in the lives of everyone in the glee club. Sometimes this turns out to be a good thing, like when Becky Jackson is rejected from the glee club and Sue invites her to join the Cheerios and later makes her the head Cheerio, or when Marley Rose needs help to fight her eating disorder and Sue pays for therapy for her (via Vulture).

Sometimes, though, Sue's actions are downright bizarre, like the time she locks a broken-up Blaine Anderson and Kurt Hummel in an elevator in an effort to force them back together. Yikes. 

There's caring for your students and then there's crossing a line, and Sue definitely crosses that line over and over again on Glee. In real life, she most likely would have been fired for some of her antics.

People on Glee do some truly reprehensible things. Rachel Berry is a diva who often treats other people like they're inferior, Noah "Puck" Puckerman is a bully, Finn Hudson publicly outs Santana Lopez as a lesbian at school, and Kitty Wilde pushes Marley Rose into an eating disorder relapse  — and that's just the tip of the iceberg. While it's nice that Glee portrays even its likable characters as flawed individuals who make mistakes, it also lets pretty much everyone get away with some awful behavior.

Most of the terrible things done by the members of the glee club go unpunished. When bad behavior gets called out, it's often forgotten a few episodes later. We're not saying everyone should carry a grudge, but you'd definitely think that there would be a bigger fallout from some of the things that happen on Glee. Yet actions like locking someone in a portable toilet rarely seem to result in even a detention, and everyone is still friends by the end of the series.

After several members of the New Directions, including Rachel Berry, Kurt Hummel, and Santana Lopez, graduate from McKinley High School, they all go off to explore new opportunities out of their home state of Ohio. In spite of the fact that they leave their home town, they seem to be back every few episodes. While from a storytelling perspective this makes sense as the show's writers clearly wanted to keep bringing back our favorite characters, we want to know where the characters are getting all this money to travel.

We're talking about teenagers who are either in school or are working at low-paying jobs. How are they affording to go back to McKinley High all the time? Even assuming their parents offer them some assistance, these bills must still add up quickly when they go home for everything from acting in a play at a school they've already graduated from to going back just to sing a few numbers with the glee club. Where the money to do this is coming from isn't the only question we have. We also want to know how are they finding the time to do all this.