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 rank 42nd in the Nielsen ratings, but it’s a phenomenon on social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace.

“We monitored Twitter feeds,” says Chris Albrecht, coeditor 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 humour — 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 9 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’s executive producer. “It was so exciting to see because we knew then that we had touched a chord.

“Believe me, I’ve seen a lot of different versions of our songs,” says Di Loreto of the online reproductions. “No matter how crazy they get, it’s still flattering.”

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 lissome cheerleaders on one episode?

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

“People say, ‘You should do it in drag,’” says Jason Whipple, who lip-syncs the lead. “I say, ‘We ARE doing it in drag! It’s boy drag.’”

Whipple, who recently moved to San Francisco from Vermont, made the clip as a lark in his apartment with two friends and a digital camera. they dubbed their hirsute trio the Full Silkwood, after a typically audacious punch line from the show.

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!’ my friend was like, ‘You just moved here a month ago. How does everyone know you?’”

One of the more ambitious tribute videos is a shot-for-shot restaging of the pilot’s showstopper, Journey’s Don’t stop Believin’.

Filmmaker Wes Kim recruited six friends for the reenactment, shot in downtown Seattle. because he didn’t have a portable device to play back the episode, Kim had to refresh his memory of the source material by different means.

“Everyone had iPhones and smart phones,” he says. “So for specifics, we would watch bits of it on the spot.”

More than 2 million songs by the Glee cast have been purchased on iTunes. last week, six selections from the show were among iTunes’ top 200 downloaded songs. nine episodes were among the top 200 in TV sales. And Glee: the Music, Vol. 1, released Nov. 3, sold 113,000 copies its first week to capture the No. 4 spot on the Billboard 200 chart.

The number of tribute videos may really go through the roof in the next few months if a novel initiative by the show’s producers pans out.

“Based on fan demands, we’re going to include instrumental versions only on some special editions of the soundtracks as an added element,” says Di Loreto. the second soundtrack will be released early next month.

“It’ll make it easier,” he says, “for people to do karaoke versions of our songs.”

As though Gleeks need any more encouragement.

The Philadelphia Inquirer