Television shows about high school seem to fall into some broad categories. There are the “rich white kids have issues too!” shows, like The OC, Beverly Hills 90210, and Gossip Girl. These shows tend to fall into the awful-but-amazing category and usually follow a certain formula: outsider (whether from Chino, Minnesota or – gasp – Brooklyn) starts at a new school in New York/Los Angeles and gets involved in the intense relationships and dramatic social life of the wealthy.

A fair number of high school shows are centered on a female protagonist. There’s what I’ll call the “intelligent suburban girl attempts to navigate the social structures of high school” series, exemplified by My So-Called Life or Freaks and Geeks. And the “I may look like a typical California teenager, but I’m actually a bad-ass” story, most easily recognized in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Veronica Mars.

The most recent incarnations of the high school TV show, Glee and Friday Night Lights for example, are rooted in a school-based activity, allowing for a “watch as all these different types of high-school students interact” examination of teenage life.

The topic of high school TV interested me this week because of the extensive and slightly schizophrenic range of reactions to Glee’s representation of people who are typically underrepresented in the media. I watched the first episode of Glee, a FOX show that revolves around a show choir at a high school in Ohio, when it aired in May of this year, and while many reviewers and bloggers went wild over it, I was left feeling ambivalent. (I promise that my ambivalence isn’t related to the fact that during my freshman year of high school in Ohio I cried all through Algebra II when I didn’t make it into show choir.) Glee has become one of the few breakout shows of the new season, and many songs from the cast recording released on iTunes have made it to the best-selling singles list.

This isn’t what bothers me about the show. I recognize that it makes people feel good to watch good singers sing fun songs and do cheesy dances and I have no problem with that. What bothers me is that the show garners so much praise for its diversity: it won a Diversity Award from the Multicultural Motion Picture Association and receives constant (and typically positive) attention from the media. The reaction to the show became somewhat split after this past week’s episode focusing on Artie, a character who is confined to a wheelchair: some gushed over how well the show dealt with presenting the issues that handicapped people face every day. Others pointed to the fact that (among other problems) Artie is played by an actor who isn’t in a wheelchair.

I admit that I have not been following Glee closely. I didn’t follow the show when it started its actual season this fall, and I only watched this past week’s episode after reading the incredibly mixed reactions of critics and bloggers. And while I don’t claim to be a Glee expert, I know that from what I’ve watched of the show, its methods of exploring high school clichés and minority stereotypes seem problematic.

Practically all of the high school shows I mentioned earlier rely on stereotypes, whether to solidify them, subvert them, complicate them, or use them for humor. For example, Friday Night Lights does a great job of knowingly veering away from high school clichés, allowing the characters to become realistic teenagers (despite their incredibly unrealistic level of attractiveness). Glee is touted as a stunning satire of these very stereotypes and clichés, but I fail to see this in the show.

Take, for example, this past week’s episode, which was clearly meant to give Artie depth as a character. It’s true that the show’s focus on underrepresented populations is a good thing, but some of this positivity falls away when we look at how they’re represented. In the first episode of the series, the background characters are pure stereotype. We have the gay boy, the black girl, the handicapped boy, the Asian girl, and they fail to go beyond this tokenization. In fact, throughout this week’s episode much of the humor comes from these characters acting in stereotypical ways (“Oh my god, look at that flamboyant gay boy talk about fashion! Now the black girl’s being sassy to the choir teacher! How funny!”).

Meanwhile the attractive white characters get to be part of the plotline every week, whereas the minority characters get “a very special episode.” In the episode entitled “Wheels” that belonged to Artie, much of the action was devoted to the football player-cheerleader love triangle. Furthermore, within these preachy episodes supposedly devoted to the background characters, they only explore their lives through their status as a minority. It’s important that the show portrays the issues that marginalized people face; these characters, however, don’t get to be real people. They are used to spark a sympathetic reaction in the viewer, before being demoted back to the background in the next episode, popping in every so often with a clichéd remark.

Shows like The OC and Gossip Girl don’t represent minorities at all, and this too is problematic. But they are also not praised for being something that they’re not. The representation of underrepresented people in Glee is in theory a good thing, but we, as viewers, shouldn’t praise the show simply for portraying a character in a wheelchair, or having a diverse cast. What we should push for is interesting, realistic, funny and complicated characters that happen to be diverse. Not diverse but overly simplified characters that allow the show to scream “Look at us! We’re being diverse!”