“Glee” school shooting: TV show “Glee” has drew criticism after it depicted a school shooting on Thursday night’s episode, just four months after the deadly incident in Newtown, Conn.
Around halfway into the episode, the school in Glee heard gunshots that forced students to lock themselves into the choir room.
“The world out there is really scary ... Someday, they will make me leave here and I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Becky Jackson (played by Lauren Potter) told her friend Brittany (Heather Morris) before the shooting took place, according to the Huffington Post.
“If you really prepare yourself, the world won’t seem like such a scary place,” Brittany responded.
Ahead of the episode, titled “Shooting Star,” the Newtown Action Alliance posted a warning on its Facebook ahead of time, urging people not to watch the episode.
“I would suggest if you do watch this TV show to either not watch it tonight or watch with caution,” the group said, according to CNN.
Some critics lauded the show’s ability to take on such a serious subject matter but others weren’t so generous with their praise.
“It seems far more respectful to point to real stories with real consequences as a means of generating awareness, rather than making up a story where everything turns out just fine in the end,” Vulture’s Lauren Hoffman said. “It’s also really not okay that ‘Glee’ chose to make the sole character with Down syndrome the shooter (even if she didn’t have nefarious intentions), but it doesn’t come as any sort of shock, either.”
And David Hinckley of the New York Daily News described the episode as essentially “exploitation.”
“‘Glee’ could have done this episode at any time in its history. It was done now because it had Newtown as a raw, visceral reference point,” he wrote.
The Daily News points out that the episode had been in production for six months--before the Sandy Hook shooting in mid-December.
