The program ‘Glee’, first broadcast in 2009, has everything. Drama, comedy, singing, and dancing, but most of all, there are real life high school problems. Plot lines touch upon gender issues, questions of sexuality, teen pregnancy, drug dealing, school shootings (unfortunately, still happening in the US), and all kinds of relationships.

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Now, I understand that ‘Glee’ isn’t for everyone, but it does give you a pretty good reality check. I personally really like it and recommend it to everybody. The main focus of ‘Glee’ is the glee club. In the very beginning, the glee club is for the sort of mis-fit students that like to sing, until the popular captain of the football team (the quarterback) joins and everything takes off from there. At the start of the show, all every student cares about is popularity and status. But Mr. Schuester (the Glee club teacher) and the glee club members help them realize that there is more to life. Mr. Schuester creates a safe environment where everyone can be themselves.

The actors in Glee were very young when ‘Glee’ started, and now a lot of them have suffered bad consequences later in life. Now, don’t get me wrong, I am not saying don’t be a young actor. It’s a great job, and a lot of them have great lives now, but the pressure for some was harder to handle than it was for others when they were young.

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So, the question is: Why were these young actors negatively affected? For one thing, there is no private life for you, unless you make it private, and I mean PRIVATE! If you are an actor in a film or TV series that goes well, you will have the paparazzi on you all the time. For a young person that can be a lot of pressure. I don’t think people really realise how hard it can be for someone only in their teens to deal with all of that: the pressure of having to make sure you look good, and say the right thing for pictures, interviews and podcasts. Even when you are just posting your breakfast on social media! People immediately notice if you do the “wrong thing”, and catch you out when you least expect it…

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 Back to the ‘Glee’ cast - there have been many deaths, drug overdoses and prison sentences involved with some of their lives after being on TV. Some pretty bad things happened to these adults who were young celebrities. But how do we know if they were destined to end up in prison or taking drugs anyway, or was that just one of the effects of being a young star? We also need to remember that the character they’re playing isn’t actually their reality, despite how much we like those characters and how much we want them to be a reality. Although, in ‘Glee’ there were a lot of similarities in friendship groups on screen and off. Friends and enemies.

No one can tell if they were supposed to die young, or if it was just the effect of being a young celebrity, but we do know that in the history of actors, singers and dancers, there have been way too many deaths.

So how do we fix that?