‘Gleeks’ blurring the lines between show and fans

“Glee,” Fox’s sharp and subversive musical comedy series, is averaging a respectable 8.6 million viewers a week.

And apparently all of them are going online to champion and celebrate the show, which is turning out to be more viral than H1N1.

“Glee” may have ranked 42nd in some recent Nielsen ratings, but it’s a phenomenon on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

“We monitored Twitter feeds,” says Chris Albrecht, co-editor of NewTeeVee.com, a Web site devoted to online video, “and ‘Glee’ is absolutely crushing the competition. Of all TV shows, it’s the one people Twitter about the most.”

Fans of the series — imagine “High School Musical” with a wicked sense of humor — call themselves Gleeks. They have a unique way of expressing their devotion: taping do-it-yourself copycat videos of the show’s rousing musical numbers, then posting them on YouTube or on their individual home pages.

The spontaneous explosion of tribute videos was the first indication to the makers of “Glee,” which airs at 8 p.m. Wednesdays on Fox, that their show was hitting a sweet spot with viewers.

“Right after we aired the pilot in May, people started posting their own versions of our songs online,” says Dante Di Loreto, “Glee” executive producer. “It was so exciting to see because we knew then that we had touched a chord.”

Things certainly do get loony in these play-at-home versions of “Glee.” There are videos featuring puppets, Disney cartoon characters, even a live leaf bug grooving to the show’s cover of “Gold Digger.”

Remember the sparkly rendition of Burt Bacharach’s “I Say a Little Prayer” delivered by three cheerleaders on one episode?

Imagine it painstakingly reenacted by three bearded gay men in baby Ts.

Jason Whipple, who lip-syncs the lead, recently moved to San Francisco from Vermont. He made the clip as a lark in his apartment with two friends and a digital camera.

His little jape has turned Whipple into a minor celebrity.

“I was walking with a friend of mine to a coffee shop,” he says. “A couple of people stopped us. ‘You’re the guy from the video!’”

The vast majority of these knockoffs seem to be shot in bedrooms using Web cams. The jerky and murky results often are embarrassingly amateurish.

So why do people upload them to the Web for all the world to see?

Uploading videos, says Alexander Riley, associate professor of sociology at Bucknell University, “has a lot to do with the role celebrity plays in a society like ours. It’s increasingly apparent that many celebrities are made by a particular process. There’s the thought, ‘If they can be a celebrity, I can, too.”’

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