If you're one of those people who's resisted Glee but is considering hopping on before the second segment of the season starts, there's still time. (Carin Baer / Fox)

by Linda Holmes

Fox recently started running a promo for the April return of Glee that make it look like everything that the people who love it could ask for. There's Madonna, there's Sue Sylvester in a cone bra, there's Will and Emma, there's a Beatles song, there are cheerleaders on stilts (a visual I love), and there is reassurance that winning sectionals is not going to suddenly make the glee kids social superstars. (It's been one of the show's best decisions not to suggest that deciding to be yourself in spite of being picked on means you will suddenly not be picked on.)

The show returns April 13, which is six weeks from tomorrow. While the long break has frustrated fans (at least this one), it has one advantage, which is that people who didn't hop on board in the fall because they didn't anticipate the show's rise to greatness (both in popularity and quality) have time to get on board between now and then. If you start now, at a clip of two episodes a week, you can get through 12 out of the existing 13 episodes, and believe me when I tell you: when you're done with episode 12, you wouldn't wait to watch episode 13 anyway, so it's a very reasonable pace.

The DVD release of Glee: The Road To Sectionals, which covers those opening 13 episodes, has been criticized as a crass attempt to get superfans to buy the same thing twice -- after all, they bought this, and they'll probably buy the full season when it's all over as well. It's a fair point; that's undoubtedly part of it. But one actual advantage to the halfway-point release is that it lets people who didn't watch it in the fall get their hands on the whole thing for the price of a couple of nights at the movies.

Glee has pretty high repeat-viewing potential to begin with, although admittedly, the extras are disappointing, especially since it's mostly stuff you can see online. (Not that it's not fun -- the minute you see Chris Colfer's audition, it's easy to understand how he not only got on the show, but got a character created just for him.) They're saving the good stuff for the full-season release, it would appear, so most of the value to the half-season set really does lie in the episodes, making it a good thing they're so watchable.

The initial release date just after Christmas was the time for the show's existing fans to grab Glee on DVD so they could tide themselves over during the lengthy break, but right about now is when it becomes valuable to people who fall into the "I always meant to watch that show" group. Now's your chance. Don't be left behind when everybody else is embracing their inner theater nerd in the middle of April.

LINK: http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/03/dear_glee_stragglers_catch_up.html