Ryan Murphy is opening up about how Cory Monteith’s death was handled on Glee.
During his appearance on the Glee recap podcast And That’s What You REALLY Missed with hosts Jenna Ushkowitz and Kevin Mchale, the Glee creator candidly revealed that he thinks the show should have ended after the young actor passed away.
Cory played the lead role of Finn Hudson on Glee. He died on July 2013, just before the series went into production for its fifth season. Season 5’s third episode, “The Quarterback,” was a tribute to Cory and Finn.
Ryan told Jenna and Kevin on the podcast:
“I would not have done that show now. I just would not have done it. I felt like it was way too raw and way too soon.”
He went on to recall how they struggled with the decision:
“I remember after a lot of conversations from a lot of people weighing in, we made the decision to keep it going and if you’re going to keep it going and keep these jobs going, how do you address what happened, because the male lead of the show died, so what do you do? Do you just pretend that it didn’t happen? You can’t do that. Did he die off camera? That doesn’t feel right to me. And I think with a lot of conversations, we decided to pay tribute to him.”
Ryan said that he would do it differently now:
“If I had to do it again, we would’ve stopped for a very long time and probably not come back.
Now, if this had happened, I would be like, ‘that’s the end’ because you can’t really recover from something like that.”
There were 30 more episodes of the show after Cory’s death. Glee ended after season 6.
