Ryan Murphy Now Thinks Glee Should Have Ended After Cory Monteith's Death

Ryan Murphy's future on the small screen is looking brighter than ever, even as he continues to highlight some of the worst people ever. But lately, the mega-producer has been looking back at his previous TV successes, including the Fox musical series Glee. As Entertainment Weekly reports, Murphy joined former cast members Kevin McHale (who played Artie Abrams) and Jenna Ushkowitz (the erstwhile Tina Cohen-Chang) this week on their rewatch podcast, "And That's What You REALLY Missed."

The trio dished on everything from the show's one-time ubiquity to performers who didn't make the cut, but the discussion took a turn for the somber when talking about Cory Monteith's death. Murphy told the hosts that he now believes the Fox dramedy, which ran from 2009 to 2015, should have wrapped after Monteith passed in 2013. “If I had to do it again," Murphy said, "we would’ve stopped for a very long time and probably not come back." 

Monteith, who played Finn Hudson, the jock turned glee clubber, was found dead on July 13, 2013, just three months after completing treatment at a drug rehab facility. Production on the fifth season of Glee was postponed following Monteith's death, but the show eventually ran for two more seasons, including a tribute episode titled "The Quarterback." Murphy said he would handle things differently now: "I would be like, 'that's the end'... Because you can't really recover from something like that. It wasn't, like, a normal death where someone is sick, and you can see them. It happened so quickly with no warning."

During the retrospective, Murphy also revealed that he's interested in reviving Glee in some form. As IndieWire noted, Murphy said he thinks it's time to "really re-examine it as a brand." Murphy mulled the idea of a Broadway musical, noting that Glee has "an interesting legacy that I’m interested in doing in a positive way after sort of pausing for a while." Despite launching franchises like American Horror Story, American Crime Story, Feud, and now, Monster, the multi-hyphenate insisted that "there will never be in my life another Glee, anything close to it, in terms of me feeling so close to it.”

Danette Chavez is the Editor-in-Chief of Primetimer and its biggest fan of puns.