Heather Morris, who played Brittany Pierce on “Glee,” marked the news on Instagram with a photo from the show’s original run and a caption saying Brittany “was in fact lost in the sewers for all these years” but is “alive and well” and “back for more.” The joke landed on the same day Disney+ and Hulu announced a series order for a “Glee” reboot, a story Deadline reported on October 21st, and the new show comes from 20th Television, the studio that produced the original. Disney confirmed the order in a joint social post saying “Glee is returning,” although no cast, plot or premiere date came with it.
The order is the one thing that is certain, since no casting, logline or production schedule was released with it. Deadline says no casting was announced as part of the order, and TheWrap says the same about the plot and the production, which leaves the word “reboot” free to mean a sequel, a revival or a fresh start. That uncertainty is where most of the interesting questions sit. A few have already started to be answered by leaks and Instagram posts. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the original “Glee” series finale.
The order is the one thing that is certain, since no casting, logline or production schedule was released with it.”
The people writing it are the people who made the original. Deadline describes Ryan Murphy as the co-creator who has been talking up a return for months while promoting his FX series “The Shards,” and TheWrap says he finished the script with Ian Brennan and Brad Falchuk, the trio who, in Murphy’s words to Entertainment Tonight in late September, “wrote all the first two seasons.” Deadline adds that “Glee” was Murphy’s first major broadcast breakthrough after “Popular” at The WB and “Nip/Tuck” at FX, and that it won him his first Emmy, for directing the pilot. What nobody has said is who will actually run the show. TheWrap notes that it is unknown how the three might divide showrunning duties, or whether a new showrunner will be brought in, and TV Insider says no team is currently attached.
The first cast name to surface, fittingly, is the biggest one. Variety reported in an exclusive that Lea Michele is returning as Rachel Berry, citing multiple sources, one of whom said “She’s in”, while another said “It’s still early-ish days, but it feels good and we’re happy to get the band back together.” Representatives for Michele and Murphy did not comment, and Variety says Disney has not officially confirmed her involvement. TheWrap reported the same day, from its own sources, that she is in talks to return, a softer phrase than Variety’s, so the exact state of any deal is not yet public. TheWrap says she would be the first original cast member to be formally attached.
Rachel Berry is the part that built Michele’s screen career, and the casting logic is hard to argue with. Variety describes a Broadway veteran of “Les Misérables,” “Ragtime,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “Spring Awakening” who led the cast for all six seasons, earned an Emmy nomination and two Golden Globe nominations for the role, and in 2022 joined the Broadway revival of “Funny Girl” as Fanny Brice, a part her character spent years dreaming about on the show. Weeks before the order, Variety notes, she told E! News “I love Ryan Murphy” and “I will follow Ryan wherever he goes,” which reads, in hindsight, like a yes. In the finale, which aired March 20th, 2015, Rachel wins a Tony, marries Jesse St. James (Jonathan Groff) and becomes a surrogate mother for Kurt Hummel (Chris Colfer) and Blaine Anderson (Darren Criss), so, as Variety recounts it, a return has a lot of settled life to disturb.
Michele, it turns out, is not alone in sounding ready. Variety says Morris and Chord Overstreet, who played Sam Evans, have both posted messages that seem to confirm their returns, and Overstreet’s reads “Reunited and it feels so good.” A separate Variety list adds Tina Cohen-Chang (Jenna Ushkowitz) to the same group, though the outlet’s own exclusive names only two. These are social posts rather than contracts, and Disney has confirmed none of them. Murphy has said he has been in touch with around 10 of the original cast members, and he has not said which ones.
The most closely watched holdout is Colfer. He told Bustle in early October, “I know nothing and have heard absolutely nothing. I wish I did.” He added that “it would be really hard to do it now that Naya [Rivera] is gone” but that fans “would probably come after me with pitchforks and jazz hands if I said no.” Days before the order, according to The Irish News, he and Criss reunited at the Royal Albert Hall in London to sing “Baby It’s Cold Outside” at Criss’s solo concert, which Variety reads as a hint and which proves nothing yet.
Variety’s staff list of fan questions treats the premise as an open field and offers speculation rather than reporting. One route it floats is a reunion built around McKinley High School’s 10-year anniversary, in which the original glee club meets the school’s current one. A smaller version has Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) retiring from the principal’s office with only a few originals returning. Capital notes that Murphy has hinted at a “new incarnation” of the series, which fits either route. It is not clear whether the new show follows fresh students at McKinley or a different school altogether.
In that list, two characters carry the heaviest questions. Variety points to a 2022 interview in which Jane Lynch told The Guardian that her character, Sue Sylvester, “would be MAGA” if the show came back. Variety says her return may depend on where the writers take a cheerleading coach who ended the series as vice president and planned a run for the presidency. It also flags Artie Abrams (Kevin McHale), noting that McHale has said he “shouldn’t be playing a character in a wheelchair.” Neither actor has been announced. Variety says outright that its picks for who returns are educated guesses.
Streaming changes the rules, and the music is the other big variable. Variety notes that Fox’s broadcast standards limited the language and imagery of the original, limits a Hulu and Disney+ release no longer has to follow. Deadline reports that Disney says the show draws around 4 million monthly listeners on Spotify, which may explain why the studio wanted it back, and that the original currently streams on Hulu. Variety’s list also wishes for new covers of Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter, both of whom began on Disney projects, but that is the outlet’s wish list and not a song announcement.
Any version of the show, in other words, also has to account for the people who are gone. Deadline names Cory Monteith, who died in 2013, and Naya Rivera, who died in 2020, and Variety adds Mark Salling, who died in 2018. Monteith was given a tribute while the series was still on the air, the Season 5 episode “The Quarterback,” which both Variety and TheWrap cite. Variety also notes that Michele dated him off screen. Salling’s case is harder, because he had pleaded guilty in 2017 to possession of child pornography, and Variety calls “the problem of Puck” the one aspect of the reboot it is dreading. Collider’s critic goes further, with a heading warning that a reboot “Risks Becoming Hokey and Exploitative of Past Tragedy.”
The timing, finally, is the last blank. Neither Disney nor the outlets give a filming start or a premiere date, and the series finale is now 11 years behind, which leaves the cast in their 30s according to Variety. Murphy has been circling a return for years, since Capital says he discussed a reboot on the podcast of Jenna Ushkowitz and Kevin McHale in 2022. Deadline quotes him saying in July that “it’s come back around” because “So many young people now watch it,” and less than two months later he said he had a script. That makes a series order the next logical step, though nothing so far shows whether it will be a sequel, a revival or something stranger.
For now the picture is a creator, a studio, one reported lead and a handful of Instagram captions. A Murphy-written script and a cast that is at least listening make this sturdier than most revivals at the same stage. Nothing announced yet shows whether the series wants to revisit McKinley High or to replace it. For a show built on outsiders finding a place, that choice will likely say more than any casting list.
What Do You Think? Should the “Glee” reboot bring back the original New Directions as adults, or hand the glee club to a new class? Is Lea Michele’s return the right place to start? And how should the series honor Cory Monteith and Naya Rivera?
See you on the next binge!
