Dear writers and producers,

You are now entering the fifth season of your hit television show Glee. Three of the four preceding seasons have been convoluted, occasionally offensive, and critically panned.

Ratings have been steadily slipping, and more and more fans are jumping ship to Teen Wolf or whatever the Tumblr flavor of the day is. A good number of the ones who’ve been Stockholmed into sticking around (such as yours truly) are here for specific characters and actors, and not the ensemble. You’ve got a Heroes-scale problem on your hands, and we all know how that ends.

It wasn’t always this way.

Before I get into the meat of the argument, I should clarify that I don’t have a problem with Glee’s central identity as a show. Many of Glee’s critics like to attack the messy sprawl or ridiculous, improbable plot lines. I don’t think that “campy” and “ridiculous” are bad things for Glee to be. It’s a show about a high school show choir. There’s no way to treat show choir in fiction with a straight face. Why should a teen dramedy structured around musical theater sequences aspire to gritty realism? Show choir is ridiculous. High school drama is messy and improbable. It’s a huge ensemble cast. Sometimes Glee will swing and go wide, and that’s okay.

The real problem is that Glee forgot what made it special. Every week we’re treated to a new “issue of the moment” plot. Sexual abuse, school shootings, bulimia, suicide, texting while driving. You name it, and Glee’s had a Very Special Episode about it. Almost invariably, these episodes don’t just fail, they fail spectacularly and offensively.

Along the way, the writers heard a couple of critics claim that Glee speaks for the outcasts, and they’ve proceeded under the delusion that Glee is the voice of a generation. These After School Specials masquerading as social consciousness are the product of a show that is just self-aware enough to understand that it’s got a platform to raise awareness, but not self-aware enough to realize that treating these issues with trite sentiment and a heavy ladle of emotional manipulation is not a public service. It’s an insult.

Glee was at its best in the first season, before the producers realized that they could capitalize on a self-congratulating “Born This Way”-style campaign. Forget Breaking Bad or Mad Men; back in ’09, Glee was the bleakest show on television. First and foremost, the show was about failure. Glee built the framework of a small town and filled it with sad, desperate people who were slowly realizing that they might never get out. Everyone had big, bright dreams: Will Schuester had dreams, Rachel had dreams, Finn had dreams. Even poor no-thumbs Henri had dreams. Glee paid lip service to the “follow your heart”-type sentiment, but it was more interested in the wreckage of dreams and what happens to people when they inevitably realize that dreams don’t all come true.

McKinley High was filled with people who didn’t like themselves or where they were going in life. Will Schuester is the most obvious example, as the man who taught a high school choir because he was still stuck on that old glory he knew he’d never get back. The cast of characters latched onto glee club as a coping method. Putting on a show was the only escape they had from reality, and even that only lasted as long as the applause. The New Directions gave their best performances when some of that desperation bled through. “Somebody to Love” and “Don’t Stop Believing” were stunning numbers because when the lights went down, the same sad people were left standing on stage with nowhere else to go.

The strongest imagery in the series follows this thematic vein. Scenes like the one in “Dream On,” with Artie lying face-down on the choir room floor after Tina tries to tap dance with him. Or the one in “Mattress” when Rachel turns up alone to the glee yearbook photo and tacks on her best paparazzi smile. These are the scenes that stick; the ones that make you care for those characters, no matter how awful they are to each other by the next scene.

Glee lost its way. It’s mining for emotional resonance in the wrong territory. Instead of a roomful of kids learning to navigate a world where dreams die, we’re given a roomful of kids that exist only as mouthpieces for facile interpretations of whatever’s in the headlines this week. There are all kinds of easy outs for the kids whenever it’s convenient for the plot. Moments like the one where Carmen Tibideux magically revokes Rachel’s rejection from NYADA ring false because they’re dishonest and manipulative. Glee works best when it peels back the varnish of ambition and reveals the damaged people underneath.

I don’t think it’s too late for Glee. Producers and writers: you have all the tools in front of you. You have a history of successful writing. You have an incredibly talented cast. The characters have come this far. Why waste them on a journey that doesn’t mean something?