his point, if you look at the specifics. ... The students lie, they cheat, they steal, they lust, they lace the bake-sale cupcakes with pot in order to give the student body a severe case of the munchies. Nearly all the Ten Commandments get violated at one point or another, while the audience is invited to laugh at people's pain and folly and humiliation. ... It insults kids to suggest that simply watching Characters Behaving Badly onscreen means they'll take that as permission to do the same themselves. ... And it's set in high school, meaning it's about a journey not just to college and career but to identity and conviction, the price of popularity, the compromises we must make between what we want and what we need. Variety Brian Lowry was critical of the show's early episodes, highlighting acting and characterization issues and deeming the adult cast "over-the-top buffoons", with the exception of Mays' Emma, who he felt offered "modest redemption". Though he praised Colfer and Michele's performances, Lowry wrote that the show's talent was squandered by its "jokey, cartoonish, wildly uneven tone", deeming the series a "one-hit wonder". Following the show's mid-season finale, Lowry wrote that while Glee "remains a frustrating mess at times", its "vibrant musical numbers and talented cast have consistently kept it on [his] TiVo must list" conceding that "even with its flaws, TV would be poorer without Glee." As Glee initial success pulled in a large audience, John Doyle of The Globe and Mail wrote that the early shows "felt fresh, mainly because the motley crew of kids had a kind of square naïveté." Doyle notes that the early success took Glee away from its original characters and plot, focusing more on celebrity guests. "The gaiety is gone from Glee. You should have set it in its prime, mere months ago". Matthew Gilbert of Boston Globe similarly wrote that "It has become a powerful, promotional machine, long on hype and short on the human feeling—the glee—that once made it so addictive". Music The show's 754 musical performances, with each performance delivering an individual song or a mashup of two or more songs in a single performance, have led to commercial success, with over thirty-six million copies of Glee cast single releases purchased digitally, and over eleven million albums purchased worldwide through October 2011. In 2009, the Glee cast had twenty-five singles chart on the