Glee Season 4: 6 Lessons We Hope They Learned From Season 3

The countdown to Glee’s Season 4 premiere is no longer measured in days but in hours — hooray! — so of course we’re beyond excited. But since we want the season to be as amazing as possible, we also have a few suggestions to help Glee avoid a few of its previous pitfalls. Here are six issues we had with Season 3, along with how the show can prevent them in Season 4. Fingers crossed!

Can someone tell us what happened to Dave Karofsky (Max Adler)? We loved that Glee brought him back in Season 3, but after his heartbreaking suicide attempt followed by lovely hospital-room daydream in Episode 14: “On My Way,” the man disappeared faster than high-demand food samples at a Costco.

And that’s just one of the storyline that Glee gave short shrift. We understand that the show only has so much time to devote to each of its 1.3 billion characters (or is that the population of China?), but it’s clear that the continuity on the show could be improved.

We can’t be the only ones who are still fuming that Kurt (Chris Colfer) was denied admittance to NYADA, right? That just made no sense, given his amazing audition, so we’re not sure what the show was thinking. And it might be hard to right that wrong, but the show should now let Kurt at least experience a little success — and his budding fashion career would be a great way to do that. We believe in you, Kurt!

We love the romantic ‘ships as much as the next Gleek (duhh), but what happened to Glee’s classic friendships? Like, remember how awesome Finn (Cory Monteith) and Puck (Mark Salling) used to be together? And the only time we really saw Mercedes (Amber Riley) and Kurt hanging out in Season 3 was during that amazing scene where Rachel (Lea Michele), Mercedes, and Kurt share a bowl of popcorn over Twilight. However, the show seems on the right track by putting Kurt and Rachel together as roomies. We approve.

It seemed that, in Season 3, the show had been cured of its need for all the on-again-off-again romances and tedious love triangles that we saw in Season 2. Yet Finchel’s heartbreaking split in the Season 3 finale was a worrisome sign that we’ll be getting more roller-coaster antics from these two. Don’t get us wrong: We love Finchel, so it’s not that we want them to have less screentime per se, but we don’t want quite so many scenes showing them bickering (although with Rachel now in the Big Apple and Finn M.I.A., that might not be an issue).

We get that the world can be a messed-up place sometimes. But the Glee that we all fell in love with was the one that was a dark comedy, not one that needed to provide a “Very Special Episode” every other week. We agree that domestic abuse, bullying, and driving-while-texting are all worth addressing, but it got to be a bit much in Season 3, especially since the storylines surrounding many of these issues were sometimes forgotten by the next episode.

Sure, we’re just as excited as everyone else that Glee will be doing “Call Me Maybe.” (After all, we’re not made of stone.) But the show seemed more concerned with choosing the latest top-40 smash in Season 3 than it was in Season 1. And perhaps a lesson can be learned from a song like “Roots Before Branches,” which perfectly fit the storyline — not to mention Rachel’s voice — and even cracked our Top 10 songs list from Season 3, despite the fact that the original wasn’t a big pop hit. Not every Glee number has to be the latest Katy Perry single, y’know?

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