Some pretty huge bombshells have already emerged from And That What’s You REALLY Missed, a new podcast about the making of the Fox show Glee, hosted by two of its stars Kevin McHale and Jenna Ushowitz (Tina Cohen-Chang and Archie Abrams, respectively).
In its premiere episode last week, guest Ryan Murphy, who created the series, shared that the show's infamous show choir director Will Shuester was originally written as a crystal meth addict. It was also revealed that Justin Timberlake was initially offered the part before Matthew Morrison took on the extremely cursed role.
In part two of Murphy’s interview, which aired Monday, the multi-hyphenate had even more behind-the-scenes tea to spill, including a Season 1 guest role planned for Whitney Houson that was ultimately given to rapper Eve. He also said he had wanted to shoot a Taylor Swift-themed Glee episode that never came to fruition. The most insightful portion of their conversation, however, occurred towards the end when Ushowitz asked Murphy to speak about actor Cory Monteith’s surprising death and his notable tribute episode.
In a surprising confession, Murphy said that, if he had to do it all over again, he probably would’ve ended the series after Monteith’s passing.
“If I had to do it again, we would’ve stopped for a very long time and probably not come back,” he told McHale and Ushowitz. “Now, if this had happened, I would be like, ‘that’s the end’ because you can’t really recover from something like that.”
Monteith, who played the football player Finn Hudson, tragically passed away in 2013 from a combination of heroin and alcohol. Glee addressed his death in episode three of Season 5 titled “The Quarterback,” written by Murphy and the show’s other two creators, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan. One of the series’ highest rated episodes, it depicts how the main characters grapple with Finn’s death—the cause of which isn’t revealed—and, of course, performing various musical tributes. Filming for the episode started just a month after the 31-year-old’s death.
Despite receiving positive reviews for the episode, Murphy says that he regrets not taking a longer pause and re-evaluating the status of the show.
“It wasn’t, like, a normal death where someone is sick, and you can see them,” he continued. “It happened so quickly with no warning. And we thought things had been—first of all, we had no idea, and then it was sort of dealing with a crisis.”
Murphy also spoke about his shock discovering Monteith’s drug addiction and being a part of an intervention for the actor, who was left out of the end of Season 4 to undergo rehabilitation.
“I helped him in his intervention,” said Murphy. “And he seemed to have gotten through it in a good way. Then I went off to make The Normal Heart, and I was always talking to him every day. And he came to the set of the Normal Heart to be with me, and he was like my child.”
“He came to Fire Island,” he continued. “And he spent time with me. And I remember thinking, like, against all odds, he’s going to be okay. And then two days later—three days later, he died.”
Monteith’s shocking passing would become one of three deaths to rock the Glee world—the others being Naya Rivera (Sanata Lopez), who accidentally drowned in lake in 2020 and Mark Salling (Noah “Puck” Puckerman), who committed suicide after pleading guilty to child pornography charges. On the podcast, Murphy explained that he hasn’t approached the idea of a reboot out of respect for the deceased actors.
At the end of the conversation, Murphy, McHale and Ushowitz all, more or less, agreed that the series probably should’ve ended once the main characters “left the choir room” and graduated.
“I only cared about those kids in that room,” Murphy admitted. “That was a creative decision that maybe I should’ve addressed in the writing. I don’t know. Maybe we had done four seasons, and one of them was an acid trip. And you got to repeat your senior year or something.”
The television mogul also told the hosts that he wanted to return to the podcast to discuss the more “joyful” aspects of the series’ legacy, including Season 1’s Madonna episode. We can only hope the soundbites from that discussion will be as classically ridiculous and dumb as the show itself.
