What with Fox’s Glee currently dominating the Billboard charts and swallowing the Internet whole with debate over racy panty shots, it’s not surprising that other networks would like to copy Glee’s success. Now it seems that The CW plans to copy Glee by actually copying Glee—that is, staging its own teen-oriented dramedy where characters routinely break into songs and choreographed dance routines and calling it Acting Out, which differentiates itself by doing all that stuff at a summer camp.
The project, described as “Glee meets Bad Santa” (minus the profanity, sex scenes, and other things that made Bad Santa Bad Santa), comes from writer-director Todd Graff, who had previous experience taking interesting dialogue and characters and derailing them with shoehorned-in musical numbers in his movie Bandslam. And actually, you could say that Acting Out isn’t so much an attempt to replicate Glee—which was, lest we forget, an attempt to replicate High School Musical anyway—as a revision of Graff’s 2003 film Camp, which was also about a burnout who ends up working at a musical summer camp.
That won’t stop anyone from calling it a rip-off of Glee, of course, but perhaps Graff could set his show apart by focusing more on the comedy than the musical numbers—say, for instance, by not staging publicity-grabbing “tributes” every week, or not having all of the camp’s students be slick, Broadway-level belters right off the bat? [Cue unexplained spotlight.] It's just a suggeeeeeestion, whoa-oh-oh-oh-ohhhhh.