Rachel Berry’s Glee Spinoff Has Been Shelved and It’s Your Fault

Wow so — this story just won’t ever end, will it? This story about the far away future in which Lea Michele, Findeldorf and Chris Colfer may/may not be leaving the teevee show Glee after the third season / starring in a spin-off / staying on the show in a different capacity?

Firstly, I wanna say that I’m fairly certain I’ve never criticized or called out Ryan Murphy directly although perhaps I should have. I’ll often criticize the ambiguous creature known as “the show,” and then readers take it upon themselves to directly target Murph in the comments. I suppose I’m just not convinced that every unpopular decision Glee makes can be traced back to Ryan Murphy — he’s got writers, after all.

But honestly, I think the primary reason for my hesitance to Murphy-bash is that when you’e been dating Ilene Chaiken for six years, everyone else seems like a perfect gentleman.

That being said, it’d be irresponsible of me not to report to you that I think from reading this new interview that Ryan Murphy is a little bit butthurt!

dorothy snarker of afterellen.com

not the real ilene chaiken

“... for any of those actors to say, ‘I found out that I was fired off the show from Twitter,’ is absolutely 100% not true. None of them were fired. It was never about that. We were going to do a spin-off where the three of them were going to go on.  They all knew what was happening, they all had approved it, they all said they wanted to do it… So then what happened was it blew up and a lot of articles were written about it. Some people were writing they’re not on the show so that means they must be fired. Well, no. That was 100% incorrect.”

– Ryan Murphy

Essentially The Deadline interview reveals that when Ryan Murphy told The Hollywood Reporter that Rachel/Finn/Kurt would graduate and leave the show at the end of Season Three, he was saying this under the assumption that they’d be graduating, leaving the show, and joining ANOTHER show — the Glee spin-off!

This Glee spin-off was allegedly to be set at Julliard in New York City, because it’s totally absolutely 100% probable that three kids from McKinley High would nab three of the 24 spots available for incoming freshmen in Julliard’s acting program (12 for men, 12 for women), the most competitive theater school in the country. (Actually Rachel Berry would get into Julliard, but Finn getting into Julliard is about as likely as Kurt getting a football scholarship to Ohio State.)

Then this happened:

“I think that some of those actors’ representatives spun it in a certain way, to be quite honest, I don’t understand. We weren’t allowed to talk about a spin-off. It was too premature. We didn’t want to do it then. The idea was to do it this fall when Glee gets back on the air.  Then, to pick up and read the actors saying, “We found out we were fired from Twitter.” All of us, the studio, the network, were like, ‘OK, that isn’t exactly cool,’ because we involved all three of them in that decision. So then what happened is that we decided, ‘OK, let’s not do it.’ So that’s where we are today.”

So then essentially Murphy decided to shelve the spinoff idea, at least for now, because he’s mad at the press for turning it into a thing and he’s mad at his actors. However, because he has them in seven-year contracts, he’s not letting them go, either:

... they couldn’t come out and say, ‘No, we weren’t fired. We’re talking about a spin-off.’ Because we told them not to. And this has blown up. So now we’re not doing the spin-off. It’s not my call. Those actors have a contract for seven years. So just because they’re graduating and so many of them are beloved, if they don’t go to New York, maybe they’ll do something else. We haven’t even thought of that.

Hence Brad Falchuk saying at Comic-Con that the trio would not be leaving the show after all. Ta-da!

Anyhow, don’t let this crush your dreams of the Sanatana’s Lesbian Colony Spinoff or The Heather Morris Show or the Kurt/Santana Vampire Show! Because if Mr. Schuster taught me anything, it’s that even if you can’t sing or dance or are a male lesbian, if you believe in yourself, reach for the stars and dare to dream , you too can have a solo at Nationals or an entire spinoff all to yourself. Like Frasier!

What Glee spin-off would you like to see?