Glee's devoted fanbase – 'gleeks' – poured their emotions into the show. Now they are pouring their grief on to the internet
Your immediate reaction to the sudden death of a celebrity is a measure of how much you invested in them. When I heard that the actor Cory Monteith had died aged 31 in a hotel room in Vancouver, I felt a particular kind of sting I don't remember feeling before – a rush of sympathetic anguish for the fans of the show he starred in.
In 2011 I got the job of running the UK Twitter account of the phenomenal US TV show Glee. Musicals tend to bring me out in a rash, but I knew it had an amazingly devoted fanbase of "gleeks"– an online community whose enthusiasm would make it a rewarding job. I never loved Glee as much as they did, but I loved their love for it.
I spent several hours a day in the company of the gleeks, whose intensely positive outlook was genuinely disarming. I live tweeted each episode when it aired on a Thursday night, came up with hashtag games to keep them happy when the show was on hiatus, and chatted with them. The job was part marketing and part customer service, but I also found myself drawn into the role of unofficial counsellor. These were teenagers passionately involved in the lives of onscreen high-schoolers who reflected and played out their own feelings of isolation and confusion. They tweeted incredibly personal things to each other – and to me. Although I was just a disembodied online voice, I was still a sympathetic ear; an almost-real imaginary friend.
I knew I was doing something that wasn't really in the original job description, but I was happy to provide some kind of support to young people struggling through adolescence. All their reactions were turned up technicolour-loud – they'd be screamingly thrilled to get a tweet from me, as they were overwhelmed with happiness during every episode. Usually they'd cry: at performances of songs they loved, break-ups, kisses – everything. They poured their emotions into the show and out on to the internet.
Now they're doing it again as they experience something they may never have been through – the death of a human being they feel close to. They may work themselves into frenzies of feeling for characters who don't exist (of course this was wearing at times), but this is something enormous that many will not know how to deal with. The loss of an apparently sweet and unassuming man who appreciated their love for his work will have a profound impact. They will feel anguish for his castmates, not least his onscreen and real-life girlfriend, Lea Michele. They will lose his character, Finn, too.
The gleeks are expressing their horror and misery on Twitter, consoling each other. @gleeonsky is now run in-house at Sky by someone who looks after several accounts, and as season 4 ended last month and there's not much going on there. However, Sky has already showed two episodes of Glee in tribute to Monteith, and the account has tweeted several RIP messages. When I heard the news I was immediately sorry that I was no longer running the account because I wanted to tell them it was going to be OK.
Some Glee fans will be severely affected by Monteith's death, and I hope they find the real support they need. It was touching that Vancouver's police department acting chief offered condolences "to the family, friends, castmates and millions of fans of Mr Monteith". Their grief is real, and just because it's expressed on Twitter for a man they never met, doesn't mean it should be dismissed.
