Culture
Ryan Murphy Describes Lea Michele As Very Enthusiastic Which Is Terrifying
By Bruno Von Falken, . BSN Network. Satire.
Ryan Murphy announced this week that a reboot of the musical drama Glee is actively in development and that the surviving cast members, those who have not publicly fled the industry or filed something, are, quote, "very enthusiastic" about the prospect of returning. He said this to a reporter. On purpose.
Glee ran on Fox for six seasons between 2009 and 2015, starred Matthew Morrison as a Spanish teacher who was somehow also a choreographer, and launched Lea Michele into a level of fame that her former colleagues have spent the better part of a decade describing in terms that are not typically associated with enthusiasm.
For those who missed the original discourse: in 2021, following a wave of social media testimonials from Michele's former Glee castmates describing a working environment that sounded less like a television set and more like a regional management crisis with a jazz band, Michele issued a public apology acknowledging that her behavior had, on occasion, "not come from her best self." This is the sentence a publicist writes when the sentence the client wants to write would require legal review.
Murphy, who created Glee and has since gone on to create American Horror Story, Dahmer, The Politician, and approximately forty other productions in what appears to be a race to document every form of human suffering before he retires, confirmed that Michele is among those he considers enthusiastic. He offered no supporting evidence. He did not define enthusiastic. He moved on.
"I think the fans deserve to see these characters again," Murphy told Deadline, in a quote that uses the word "fans" as a structural support beam while quietly not mentioning what the characters, or the people playing them, might deserve. "There's something unfinished there. There's more story to tell."
Matthew Morrison, who left a subsequent Murphy project under circumstances that were also described in a press release using words that had been chosen very carefully, was not specifically mentioned in Murphy's enthusiasm accounting. This may be an oversight. It may also be a budget decision.
What Murphy has described, when examined without the theatrical lighting he instinctively applies to all announcements, is a reboot of a show that ended because it ran out of story, staffed by a cast whose collective memoir would outsell the original soundtrack, produced by a man who has never once looked at a situation and thought it might benefit from fewer cameras.
The original Glee, it should be noted, was genuinely beloved. It was also, by nearly every account from people who made it, a production environment so chaotic and interpersonally combustible that several cast members have compared surviving it to completing a form of service. Enthusiastic is one word for wanting to do it again. There are others.
Production on the reboot has not yet begun. Casting has not been confirmed. A network has not been announced. What has been announced is Ryan Murphy's read on the emotional state of a group of people who may or may not have been in the room when he formed that read.
The cast could not be reached for comment, though several of them have active Instagram accounts and have been posting regularly, which in this industry counts as a formal statement.
The story we are making fun of: https://www.rollingstone.com/tv-movies/tv-movie-news/ryan-murphy-glee-cast-enthusiastic-planned-reboot-script-1235630886/