Forever Yours, Faithfully: A Farewell to Glee

Tonight marks the endpoint of a cultural phenomenon that has had one of the oddest, most talked-about trajectories in modern television. Glee began as a bright, innovative, biting comedy, adored by critics and audiences alike. By tonight's finale, it accumulated enormous baggage and became almost abandoned entirely. Glee's legacy will be mixed, no doubt. But in some ways, if one looks past the controversial plot "twists," fractious fan wars, and increasingly off-the-rails storytelling, there is a real legacy of making the arts relevant and safe and even cool, especially embracing the quirky young people who saw themselves in Glee's wonderfully strange characters. And that's worth being proud of.