Here are some of the joy-giving ways in which I flagrantly overuse the fast-forward utility on my remote control. I watch “Gossip Girl” in under 15 minutes, skipping every single scene that does not involve Blair Waldorf. I speed through most of the operating room scenes in “Grey’s Anatomy” and forensic lab setups in “Bones.” I’ve assembled a version of “The Killing” with narrative tension and solid pacing by ignoring all the dreary, dull, rainy scenes involving Mama Larsen and the tragically paralyzed mayor and watching only those involving Holder and Linden and the Larsen case. Recently, I turned on an episode of “Glee,” started fast-forwarding, expecting to stop on a musical number or a moment that looked not excruciating, and I ended up racing through the whole episode. (Yes, I went back and watched the whole thing, begrudgingly bound by a sense of professional obligation.) And I can’t even tell you about the mauling that performance-based reality TV shows undergo, because there’s too little left when I’m done.

When I asked some friends, colleagues and Twitter about fast-forwarding habits, a few were horrified by the idea. “What if you miss something important!” a friend asked (even though, when things get really boring, he checks his email. Another anti-fast-forwarder plays Words With Friends when TV gets slow). He has a point: I make sure never to fast-forward a show I haven’t seen before or anything that I’m reviewing, but it still feels like there is something inherently disrespectful (not to mention attention-deficit inducing) about speeding through a TV show, as there would if you were skipping 50 pages of a novel, or 20 minutes of a movie.

But skimming 250 pages of “50 Shades of Grey” (which I recently, unabashedly, did) is not the same thing as scanning 50 pages of “Moby-Dick.” Not all shows are created equal, and if zapping the dull bits of “Mad Men” (it’s getting hard to remember, but prior to this bonkers season, dull bits happened with some frequency) seems like a crime against art, zapping the repetitive parts of the “Idol” results show seems like common sense, not to mention a favor to your brain. As Time TV critic James Poniewozik put it on Twitter, “If it takes you more than 5 minutes to watch an “American Idol” elimination episode, you’re doing it wrong.”

Fast-forwarding may seem like it represents the opposite impulse of the currently popular, very reverent completist school of TV watching, wherein viewers are so respectful of series and their developing dynamics that they feel guilty about starting “Justified” from the beginning of Season 2, skipping an episode of “Community,” or abandoning the second, murderous season of “Friday Night Lights,” but it’s just the flip side.  There may be some viewers who fast-forward through, say, the Skyler story line in “Breaking Bad” (and that’s between them and their conscience), but the people I spoke with were far more likely to skip around inconsistent shows as a way to improve the viewing experience by solving a series’ pacing or character problems and eliding its weakest elements with the only tool they have on hand (besides anguished tweets and comment board cries, of course).

Two of the shows frequently name-checked to me as victims of the remote were “Glee” and “Smash,” series that yo-yo more wildly than the cheapest yo-yo on the market. Zooming past underdeveloped characters like Will Schuester or Debra Messing’s personality-less husband, Frank, to get to Rachel Berry or Ivy Lynn is a resourceful way of focusing on the good stuff and not obsessing on the bad, a way to exert control over a show that is way out of control. (And then there are the songs, which some people find too excruciating to watch, and are whole point for others: “I fast-forward ‘Glee’ through every song and whenever I get bored, so it takes about 15 minutes to watch, depending,” someone told me. Another said she skipped “all of ‘Glee’ except when they are singing a radio pop song.”)

Competitive reality shows like “Idol,” “The Voice,” “Dancing With the Stars” and “The Bachelor” — other common targets of a merciless shortening — even seem built with the knowledge that audiences will speed through parts of them: How could they repeat themselves so much and so brazenly otherwise? Just as serial dramas are now created with the knowledge that some viewers will watch them very closely, all at once, looking for continuity, and that soap operas move slowly and repeat themselves over and over again exactly because their original audience — mothers with chores — would often catch the show in bits and pieces and without a pause button, reality TV utilizes fast-forwarding, putting on a two-hour show with five minutes of content. (And speaking of things that get better with a remote: soap operas, which you can speed through in under 10 minutes.)

Fast-forwarding is cutthroat and impatient, but it is yet another way to turn TV from the passive, coach-potato fest that drives parents crazy, into a more engaged face-off between audience and show and, more explicitly, that show’s creator. The version of “The Killing” that can be cobbled together with some judicious skipping foregrounds the series’ best actors and solves its intractable pacing problems. It may not be what “Killing” creator Veena Sud intended — it’s better than that.

Sound familiar? Wasn’t it this time last year that a Fox affiliate was stressing out that “Glee” might turn our children gay? Wasn’t it just this week that Tennessee moved to eradicate any mention of homosexuality from the elementary school curriculum because, as Rep. Joey Hensley put it, “I have two children — in the third and fourth grade — and don’t want them to be exposed to things I don’t agree with.” It’s the old LA LA LA I DON’T WANT TO SEE YOU ploy, one that assumes whatever “these dopey kids” know about, they will “experiment” with. It’s the same kind of faulty logic that insists that abstinence-only programs will keep kids from having sex. (Spoiler: They will not.)

It’s fortunate that Pirro was on hand to gape, “Do you really think that this is the kind of thing that’s contagious?” and explain that “We all parent our kids but you can’t parent their sexuality.” Sadly, it didn’t seem to penetrate O’Reilly’s or Carlson’s brain. That “.3 percent” that Carlson so sneeringly refers to takes an overwhelmingly disproportionate amount of abuse and harassment. That’s why it’s awesome when they can see positive images of themselves on television. And as one of the teens in a powerful new clip from Illinois Safe Schools explains, “Just because you’re gay doesn’t mean you want to go sleep with every guy or turn all straight people gay.” It’s about being visible; it’s about moving from the darkness of ignorance to basic respect.

Frankly, I don’t let my own 8-year-old watch “Glee” because I think it’s too racy for her – and I question any high and mighty moralizer who thinks it’s just “a nice family show with some nice music.” But my daughter knows that there are gay and lesbian and transgender people in the world – she even knows gay and lesbian and transgender people! And yes, sometimes it’s confusing for kids to get their heads around identity and sexual orientation. But I’m here to tell Gretchen Carlson it’s a lot easier teaching a child that some boys feel they were meant to be girls than it is answering their questions about gravity or the nature of time or how big God is. To paraphrase Louis CK on the hand-wringing over what to tell The Children, it’s your kid, you figure it out.

Like Carlson, I care about what my kids watch. I don’t want my children exposed to images or ideas that would influence them to be mean or cold or desensitized to violence and its consequences. I likewise don’t want my daughters to pick up any notions from the media that they have to be skinny or sexy or downplay their intelligence to be liked.

But I don’t believe for a second that gay and trans kids are trying to ruin anybody’s Tuesday evening musical entertainment with an agenda of indoctrination. They’re not trying to entice America’s little boys to put on dresses. Good entertainment is just about understanding the human condition, about empathy for characters whose lives and experiences may be just like ours, or completely different from them. I’m about as non African-American transgender male teenager as it gets, and I can honestly say that having one on television poses exactly zero threat to my family or the identity of any member within it. “Glee’s” Unique isn’t out to change your kids or mine. Unique is just a fellow human being, with dreams and disappointments and dignity, whose boogie shoes just happen to be silver, and very, very high.

“Glee” is currently in its third season, and has just been picked up for a fourth, but it feels much older. Shows often hit their creative peaks in Seasons 2 or 3, cruise along for a few more years, and then begin to decline, hitting up against the limits of the various character permutations. But “Glee,” which eats plot faster than Ebola eats flesh, has sped through this cycle. Watching has become exhausting and enervating.

I can remember a time when I loved “Glee” — I think. When “Glee” premiered in 2009 it was an immediate smash and a social phenomenon, an over-the-top and joyous hit buoyed along not only by its structural originality but by its sharp wit, big heart and daring sexual politics. But the show has fallen so far, so fast, I have begun to wonder if the common wisdom— that it was great, and then took a nosedive, as Ryan Murphy shows are wont to do — is true. Were the guest stars, breakneck pacing, hit-you-over-the-head messaging, cheesy mashups, smug self-satisfaction and reckless character assassinations there from the beginning, in smaller amounts? And did I just not notice because I was too busy dancing around to “Single Ladies” with the rest of the McKinley high football team and reveling in the novelty of a show so unabashedly musical and unabashedly liberal? In other words, was “Glee” ever good?

Watching early “Glee” is a two-tiered experience: On the one tier, there is the simple fact that, yes, “Glee” used to be much better. But on the second tier is the undeniable, hindsight-enabled observation that bad “Glee” has always been lurking around. For my money, the best episode of “Glee” is its fourth, the one in which Kurt becomes the football team’s kicker with the help of Finn, inspires the team to do the “Single Ladies” dance on the field to win and then comes out to his father. The episode is jubilant, surreal, outlandish, bold and emotional, but even it contains harbingers of the nonsense to come. In the same episode, Quinn announces she’s pregnant, Finn believe he’s the father because he ejaculated into a hot tub once, and Mr. Schuester’s Terri, faking a pregnancy of her own, begins angling for the baby.

Much of good “Glee” is showcased in the early episodes, which seem downright low-key compared to what has come since. There’s singing and Slurpees and Rachel’s Tracy Flickian intensity, but the plot is contained — a bunch of kids who want to be cool; a teacher trying to make a difference; a girl with a crush on a boy — and the characterizations are nuanced. Mr. Schuester, who has since been condemned to dull, boring sainthood, unethically blackmails high-school quarterback Finn into joining Glee club in that first episode. The sparkly-eyed, then baby-faced Kurt gets bullied daily, but it is only one part of his day, not the message of entire episodes.

But from the jump, the cast was too big, the writers easily losing interest in the core characters. You may not remember Ken Tanaka, Sandy Ryerson, Mr. Schuester’s wife, Terri, and Howard Bamboo, but all had meaty roles in the first handful of episodes. And while guest stars have become a plague on “Glee,” they were also there from the beginning: Josh Groban cameos in Episode 3.

Also apparent by Episode 3: “Glee’s” weird cruelty to its cast, wherein the writers seems to believe it’s better to call out the physical shortcomings of their actors than to leave it to online trolls. An evil little dance instructor named Dakota Stanley runs through the Glee club members and tells them to get nose jobs or go on diets, bitchy tips that presaged future episodes in which Finn would get called out for his flabby tummy, Rachel would want a boob job, Mercedes would be obsessed with candy bars and Sam would get dubbed Trout Mouth.

And there is some damage done by later “Glee” that can’t be undone. Consider Mr. Schuester, who in the early episodes was the meaty, main character — a good, if disappointed man who avoided wallowing in his failures by helping his students achieve their dreams. His passion for Glee club was admirable and also a little selfish. It was his way to redeem himself, as well as the students around him. His occasional acts of self-involvement — to stop coaching Glee to focus on his own group, Acafellas, for example — made him more than just the simpering, cliché-spewing machine he has since become. But the fact is, three seasons in, that’s all Mr. Schue is, the annoying, curly-haired guy who says “I believe in you” too often. Sure, he seemed like he could have been a great character, but he didn’t in fact become one. Early “Glee” is a reminder of his squandered potential (and also his poor rapping skills).

The most exact measure of how “Glee” has changed, however, comes in the transformation of Kurt Hummel, who has always been “Glee’s” soul. Early Kurt, a gay teenager dealing with all the hardship that entails, was a delight, at once extremely attuned to the bigotry of the world around him, to the homophobia of his peers and the implicit disappointment of his father, and yet innately, unconsciously uncowed. He tries out for the football team hoping to bond with his father, and yet it never occurs to him that performing the “Single Ladies” dance as a part of his kick-off routine might undercut this in any way. When he dances on the field to Beyoncé he’s not trying to make a point, he’s just doing what he needs to do to succeed. He’s just being himself. Kurt, just like early “Glee,” didn’t know his own strength and charm.

In the seasons since, Kurt has matured: He came out, he got comfortable, he got a boyfriend, he lost his virginity, and is now mentoring his gay peers— his helping Karofsky to imagine a future life for himself was the best thing about “Glee’s” last episode — but he has also hardened. He’s become more self-righteous and smug, always staying on message, more spokesperson than student. It’s hard to imagine Kurt doing anything as spontaneous as dancing around on a football field to try to make his dad happy.  Just like many of the characters on “Glee” he now seems locked into dispensing life-affirming advice. “Glee” knows Kurt’s strength  — he  is likely to be the show’s lasting contribution to the cultural lexicon, one of the first proudly gay and popular teen characters on television — and so they’ve made him the show’s self-satisfied mouthpiece. As with everything else “Glee” has changed over its short run, the show’s not better for it.

You got the feeling the whole thing was built around a product endorsement, in this case “Michael Jackson: The Immortal World Tour,” which was mentioned twice and just happens to open in the U.S. right around the time next week’s “Glee” rolls around.

Part of the problem was the lily-white cast. This might be central Ohio, but can we believe there are no African-American males at William McKinley High School? Even when the singing group from the competing private school is on-screen, the only black male face is in the background.

New Directions has the big voice of Amber Riley, the only African-American with a speaking role until NeNe Leakes was recently added to the cast as the swim coach. But even Riley’s big voice seemed underused on a duet with Chord Overstreet on “Human Nature.” Leave it to Naya Rivera to bring the most soul to the proceedings, but her duel with Grant Gustin on “Smooth Criminal” seemed oddly staged (though it was backed by dual cellos, in the episode’s one notable arrangement).

When it comes to Jackson, apparently all anyone remembers are the dancing duels, so there was another one in a parking lot to “Bad” against the Warblers.

Either way, it’s a cheap way to impress drama on a pop song, just as it was in the original “Bad” video. (They’re going to dance their way out of this? Sure they are.)

And who said “Glee” was a drama anyway? Although all the minor crises of high school are explored over and over (to the sound of that annoying bell at the start of every scene), the show presents itself as a comedy, though there was just about one joke this week, when Mark Salling’s brooding Puck told Darren Criss’ character, Blaine, that he was a turncoat. “You’re a modern day Eggs Benedict,” he said, though he swallowed the line in such a way that most probably never heard him.

It was the kind of malapropism that was a natural for Heather Morris’ delightfully dim Brittany, but she hasn’t had anything much funny to say this season. And despite winning Emmys for her role as the ruthless cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester, Jane Lynch hasn’t had anything interesting to do on the show for more than a season (and this was another one of those episodes that she wholly sits out).

The one kid who relates best to Jacko, it turns out, is the nerdy one, played by Kevin McHale (or at least he puts on the impression that he does, since he emits Michael’s trademark “whoo!” at various points in the show).

He also turns out the most heartfelt speech of the show, which amazingly turns the whole “It gets better” public service campaign on its head. When Blaine gets hit with yet another Slushee (the weapon of choice in Lima, Ohio) and is actually injured, McHale’s Artie suddenly blurts to Michael Morrison’s increasingly ineffectual teacher, Will Schuester, “Don’t give me any of that ‘It gets better’ crap because I’m not interested in it getting any better. I want it to be better!”

The eruption is immediately followed by Artie ditching his wheelchair for only the second time in show history in order to join Harry Shum Jr.’s Mike Chang on an excruciatingly exact replication of Jackson’s worst video – the tuneless, black-and-white “Scream” he did with sister Janet Jackson.

When it comes to picking up exact video images, though, the highlight must have been the morphing scene of character face into character face during the climactic “Black or White.” Except in this case, of course, it was much more “White or White.”

OK, actually, I should qualify that — the middle section was brilliant. The wraparound stuff was the “Glee” usual: silly, pandering and dull. During the final number — “Do They Know It’s Christmas,” set in a soup kitchen that no doubt was populated by the children of “Glee” cast and crew — even the actors seemed bored, except for Jane Lynch, whose Coach Sylvester was acknowledging the first anniversary of her sister’s death. (Tear cup.) But OH MY GOD IF YOU COULD HAVE SEEN THAT MIDDLE SECTION, DIARY! Presented in black-and-white, it perfectly re-created the set, the tone and even the camera moves of “The Judy Garland Show” Christmas special from 1963, but with a cultural flash forward/flashback quality, presenting a patchwork quilt vision of America that wouldn’t have gotten past the network censors four decades ago.

Artie conceived the special to fill unexpectedly vacant airtime on the local PBS affiliate. Lovers Kurt and Blaine, devoted Friends of Judy, hosted an homage to the broadcast that they no doubt would have watched in awe had they been a couple (closeted, surely) in early-1960s Lima, Ohio. Early in the episode proper, there were ostentatious references to 1978′s legendarily awful “Star Wars Holiday Special,” but in the PBS special, that reference was reduced to Finn and Puck dropping by in Luke Skywalker and Han Solo costumes and performing a Springsteen-y version of “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town.” The rest of the special was Judy, Judy, Judy. The filmmaking was vintage 1963, letting action play out in waist-up medium shots and head-to-toe long shots with a minimum of cutting. “Glee” even replicated the old-fashioned network TV special conceit of pretending that the unseen viewer was a party guest (“Well, hello! … Come on in!”). I love that certain McKinley High performers were incredibly smooth on camera, while others glanced nervously at the lens. And the staging of Kurt and Blaine’s “Let It Snow” was a delight.

Set, according to Artie, in the Swiss Alps village of Gstaad, there was a kind of alternate-universe feeling to the whole production, as if it were unfolding not on a public-TV soundstage in Lima but in a blandly benevolent dream space — one in which the characters all got along fantastically well and never cut each other down in public or stole each other’s boyfriends and girlfriends, and one in which it was possible to call Christmas “Christmas” rather than “the holidays” without seeming exclusionary. Herbie the Elf — sorry, Rory the Irish exchange student — even invoked “A Charlie Brown Christmas” by reciting from the New Testament, Linus-style. (“Lights, please.”) During a season in which “Glee” feels even more slapped-together than it already did, this charming interlude was a reminder of what the show can do when it puts its mind to it.