Ryan Murphy is Threatening to Reboot Glee

Ryan Murphy’s newest show is The Shards. It’s an adaptation of a very odd and meta book by Bret Easton Ellis, one that seems, at least to me, to be largely unadaptable. But Murphy does love salaciousness, self-conscious camp, and sexy murder, so maybe this is the ideal source material for him. As he promotes the series, set to premiere on FX, the topic of some of his other work came up in a recent interview with People. What about Glee, he was asked.

Apparently, Gen Z-ers are now watching the show and boosting its popularity/notoriety. Would Murphy be interested in a reboot? “That show is interesting because it’s come back around. So many young people now watch it. And I’m like, ‘Maybe we should revisit that show,’” he said. “My nostalgia and love for that show is enough that I’m like, ‘Well, maybe people would like to see a new incarnation of that in some capacity.’ So yeah, I love that show, and I loved what it became and what it meant to so many people.”

Oh dear lord, please no.

Glee feels like a fever-dream, a concept dreamed up in a lab by someone trying to create the most terrifying encapsulation of the late-2000s to early 2010s. It had everything, usually in a completely baffling way, and all tied together with songs! It was, for a while, the biggest show on TV, a genuine phenomenon that inspired a North American tour with the cast, a movie of said tour, and a reality series to cast new actors. Its soundtrack regularly dominated iTunes and fandom spaces were absolutely overrun with Gleeks. And all in service of one of the most fascinating train-wrecks in the history of the medium.

It’s easy to forget now, but Glee started out as a pretty dark comedy about a failure of a teacher who tries to live vicariously through his students. It was an Alexander Payne movie with music. But as the show grew more bloated and the expectations higher, it shifted into an endless soap opera of issue-of-the-week subplots, themed music specials, and sickly sentimentality that undercut the initial bleakness that made it stand out. Every episode felt as though it was written around whatever the mandated songs of the week were, from the Rocky Horror episode to “Gangnam Style.” The ways that some characters were blatantly favoured by the showrunners over others — *coughRachelcough* — proved increasingly aggravating. The worse the show got, the more Important it believed itself to be. Remember that “school shooting” episode? Yikes.

I wonder what the kids of today think of Glee. Do they watch it with a sense of irony, like a period piece from the days of yore? Or are they truly into it, like they were with Friends and The Office? Either way, I can’t see a reboot working in 2026. It’d be great to have a show that diverse on the air given how quickly such inclusivity was erased from network TV in recent years. But doing Glee today would either mean playing it totally earnestly or sinking so far into smothering nihilism that it makes All That Jazz look like Grease. Either way, I can’t say I’d trust Ryan Murphy to pull it off. Haven’t we suffered enough?