Glee facts you forgot before the reboot brings it back

Glee premiered on Fox on May 19, 2009, as a format broadcast television had not really tried before: part high school dramedy, part jukebox musical, built around a show choir called New Directions at the fictional William McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio. Within a season it had turned weekly cover versions into charting singles, played arenas on a live concert tour, and made household names of Lea Michele, Chris Colfer, Naya Rivera and Jane Lynch. Six seasons later, in March 2015, it signed off with a flash-forward finale that handed every major character a future. Talk of a Glee reboot has now put that original run back into circulation.

The show was never only the earnest underdog story people remember. It was also a music business operation, releasing studio recordings on a near-weekly schedule and piling up Billboard chart entries at a pace no conventional recording artist could match. And its creative roots were specific: a feature film idea reworked into a television pilot by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, drawn partly from Murphy's own time in an Indianapolis show choir.

Loss shaped the series in real time. Cory Monteith died in July 2013, and the writers wrote his character out on screen without ever naming a cause. The cast's lives after McKinley diverged sharply: Broadway stardom for some, a federal criminal case for one, and deaths that had nothing to do with the production.

These 12 facts about Glee cover the parts nostalgia tends to smooth over — the four-month gap between the pilot and the rest of season one, the Broadway and professional dance credentials hiding inside the cast, the chart records it set through sheer volume of releases, the artist tribute episodes that doubled as soundtrack launches, the midseason casting that produced one of its biggest hits, and the darker chapters that trailed some of its actors long after the choir room emptied.

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Fox aired the Glee pilot on May 19, 2009, then kept the series off the air until September 9, 2009 — a gap of nearly four months between the first episode and the second. The premiere ran directly after American Idol, then the highest-rated program on U.S. television.

The scheduling was deliberate. Fox borrowed the Idol finale audience to launch an unproven musical series, and instead of following that hour with a continuous run of episodes, the network let it sit. The pilot worked as a sampler, designed to seed interest and let it build over the summer.

Music filled the gap. The cast's version of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'," performed in the pilot's closing minutes, went on sale digitally and climbed the Billboard Hot 100, reaching the top five that June. A song first released in 1981 became the show's calling card before most viewers could name a character in it.

That single did work no trailer could. It put the show's name on radio, in digital storefronts and in conversation during months when no new episodes existed. Fox also had an unusually long promotional runway, with the full summer to market a series audiences had already sampled.

By the September premiere, Glee arrived with a hit single attached and months of accumulated word of mouth — rare for a new broadcast drama with no established franchise behind it.

The launch set the pattern for everything after. Fox treated the music as the show's primary marketing engine, releasing cast recordings as commercial singles alongside each new episode across all six seasons. Soundtracks, digital downloads and concert tours followed. An hour of television doubled as a product release, and the arrangement held up long enough to put dozens of cast covers on the charts.

The split premiere also demonstrated something the industry noticed. A broadcast network could manufacture demand for a show through a song rather than through continuous episodes, and the business logic behind the entire series traces back to a pilot that aired alone, four months ahead of the show it belonged to.

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The Glee cast passed Elvis Presley's career total of Billboard Hot 100 entries in 2010, about a year and a half after the show's first single went on sale. Only The Beatles had placed more songs on the chart than the fictional students of New Directions.

Release volume, not sustained popularity, produced that record. Glee released studio recordings of nearly every song performed on screen, usually putting them up for digital purchase the same week an episode aired. One hour of television could yield five or six new tracks. A 22-episode season could generate well over 100.

The Hot 100 counts digital sales alongside radio airplay, and the show's release schedule gave its cast a route onto the chart that no conventional recording act could match. A traditional artist might put out an album every two or three years and work two or three singles from it. Glee operated as a singles factory with a weekly deadline and a prime-time platform to promote each batch.

Most of those entries were brief. A track would debut on the strength of fans buying it in broadcast week, land in the lower half of the chart, then vanish within a week or two. The cumulative figure was assembled from dozens of small, short-lived appearances rather than a handful of long-running hits.

The Presley comparison is really a comparison between two eras of music distribution. He accumulated his entries across more than two decades, when a song's chart life depended on radio programmers and sales of physical records. The Glee cast reached a higher total in a fraction of that time by taking advantage of how the chart had been rebuilt for the iTunes era.

The record carries a caveat. The entries were credited to Glee Cast, a billing that covered a rotating lineup of actors performing other artists' material. That chart presence disappeared once the show stopped producing new episodes, a sign that the songs sold as extensions of the broadcast rather than as records in their own right.

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Ryan Murphy sang in a show choir as a teenager in Indianapolis, and Glee grew directly out of that experience. The mix of sincerity and mockery the series aimed at choir culture came from someone who had spent time inside it.

Murphy has talked publicly about show choir as formative, both as something he loved and as something that marked him out at school. That contradiction became the emotional premise of New Directions. The group's core idea — students with little social standing who find one another through performance — was not invented in a writers' room.

The project reached Murphy in an unusual way. Ian Brennan, who had done show choir himself in Illinois, first wrote Glee as a feature screenplay. Brad Falchuk read the script and brought it to Murphy, and the three of them rebuilt it as a Fox pilot. All three are credited as creators of the series, and Murphy directed the pilot himself.

That background shows in the mechanics the show bothers to get right: the sectionals-to-regionals-to-nationals competition ladder, the arranging and setlist decisions that shape what a choir can perform, and the rigid campus hierarchy separating choir kids from the football team and the cheerleading squad. Those details come from a real subculture, not from plot convenience.

Casting followed the same instinct. Chris Colfer auditioned for the role of Artie Abrams; the creative team wrote a new character, Kurt Hummel, for him instead. Kurt's storyline — a gay teenager bullied at McKinley who gains standing through his voice — gave Glee a specificity that set it apart from other high school dramas airing in 2009.

The result worked for viewers who had never set foot in a choir room. Its subject was competitive singing. Its underlying question, drawn from Murphy's own adolescence in Indiana, was where a teenager goes when the rest of the building has no use for them.

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Jane Lynch came to Glee out of improvisational comedy, and the writers left room in Sue Sylvester's scenes for her to go off-script. Several of the cheerleading coach's most quoted insults began as Lynch's own ad-libs rather than lines on the page.

Lynch spent years in Chicago theater and improv before building a film career with Christopher Guest, appearing in largely improvised mockumentaries including "Best in Show" and "A Mighty Wind." Guest's actors work from outlines instead of finished dialogue. That method carried straight into Sue, whose monologues often ran longer and stranger than a network comedy would normally allow.

Ryan Murphy wrote the part for Lynch, and almost lost her. She had already committed to another Fox pilot while Glee was casting, and became a full series regular only after that project failed to go forward.

Sue functioned as the show's counterweight. Glee ran on sincerity — underdog kids, earnest ballads, lessons about belonging. Sue punctured all of it from the next room, running the Cheerios like a paramilitary unit, dictating her journal aloud, taping local news editorials in a velour tracksuit and treating Will Schuester's hair as a personal insult. Without that satire, the tonal swings would have collapsed into sentiment.

The performance won Lynch the Primetime Emmy for outstanding supporting actress in a comedy series in 2010, during the show's first season. A Golden Globe in the supporting television category followed in January 2011.

The writing then expanded around what Lynch could do with it. Sue acquired a sister in an assisted living facility, a wedding to herself, a stint as McKinley's principal and real loyalty to Becky Jackson, played by Lauren Potter. That softer material worked because Lynch never dropped Sue's absolute conviction in her own logic, however ridiculous it was. The villain stayed funny across six seasons because the actor kept finding new places to take her.

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Lea Michele arrived at Glee with a professional theater résumé that predated the show by more than a decade. She made her Broadway debut as a child, playing young Cosette in Les Misérables, and in 2006 she originated the role of Wendla in Spring Awakening, the Duncan Sheik and Steven Sater musical that went on to win the Tony Award for best musical.

That background explains how Rachel Berry functions as a character. Rachel is written as a teenager who already behaves like a working professional — fixated on Broadway, fluent in the musical theater canon and openly convinced of her own talent. Casting a performer who had logged years in that world gave the part a credibility a standard television audition process would have been hard pressed to deliver.

The effect showed up in the arrangements. Numbers built around Rachel drew on belted show tunes and technically demanding stage material as often as on contemporary pop, and they were written with the knowledge that the performer could deliver them live and in the studio.

Spring Awakening also fed Glee's casting. Jonathan Groff, who originated Melchior opposite Michele in that production, joined the first season as Jesse St. James, the star of rival show choir Vocal Adrenaline.

Rachel's long-term storyline follows the same logic. She leaves Lima for New York, enrolls at a fictional performing arts conservatory and eventually lands a Broadway lead — the career the actor playing her had already built, only in the opposite order, stage first and television second.

Michele went back to Broadway in 2022, taking over as Fanny Brice in the revival of Funny Girl. That is the same role Rachel pursues and wins inside the fictional world of Glee, a storyline that carries much of the fifth season. The overlap between performer and part is one reason Rachel read as something other than a high school archetype.

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Heather Morris worked as a professional backup dancer, including with Beyoncé, before she ever appeared on Glee. She joined the production for her movement skills, and the character of Brittany S. Pierce was built out from there.

Brittany started in the background: a Cheerios squad member with almost no dialogue, slotted into formation behind the leads during ensemble numbers. The few lines she got were short deadpan non sequiturs, and they worked well enough that the writers kept adding more. She became a series regular in the second season, with storylines of her own.

Dance training explains why Brittany was so often placed near the front of the show's harder choreography. Glee shot large ensemble numbers on a television schedule, with limited rehearsal and complicated camera work. A performer who could pick up a routine fast and repeat it cleanly take after take was worth building sequences around. Morris danced the "Single Ladies" number in the season one episode "Preggers" alongside Chris Colfer and Jenna Ushkowitz, one of the first sequences to show the series could carry a scene on movement rather than vocals.

The mix of precise dancing and flat comic delivery gave the character a register no one else on the show had. Brittany would finish a clean routine and then deliver something absurd without shifting expression, and the contrast worked without needing a song behind it.

The role outgrew that job description. Brittany's relationship with Santana Lopez, played by Naya Rivera, became one of the series' longest-running romances and one of the few teenage same-sex couples depicted on U.S. broadcast television at the time. The pairing drew a large fan following and moved Brittany from comic relief into dramatic material, including the couple's wedding in the sixth and final season.

Morris kept dancing publicly after Glee ended, competing on Dancing with the Stars in 2017. Her path through the show — from a dancer hired for what she could do on the floor to a named character with a six-season arc — owed more to what the production needed each week than to a conventional audition.

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Darren Criss appears in none of Glee's first season. He joined midway through season two, on November 9, 2010, in the episode "Never Been Kissed," playing Blaine Anderson — lead soloist of the Dalton Academy Warblers and, later, Kurt Hummel's boyfriend and husband.

The character was introduced through a musical number rather than through dialogue. Kurt, sent to spy on a rival show choir, walks into a Dalton Academy hallway and watches Blaine front an a cappella version of Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream." The recording became one of the best-selling singles the series ever released.

Blaine's role expanded quickly. He started as a recurring character, was promoted to series regular for season three, and the Warblers became a standing fixture of the show rather than a one-episode competitive obstacle. Columbia Records put out a separate Warblers album in 2011, built around the group's a cappella arrangements.

Criss arrived with a performance background that shaped how the part was written. At the University of Michigan he helped found the student theater company that became StarKid Productions, whose unauthorized "A Very Potter Musical" circulated widely on YouTube and gave him a following before Glee cast him. He wrote and performed his own music, which is part of why Blaine's songs leaned toward guitar-driven pop rather than musical theater standards.

Blaine transferred to McKinley High in season three and joined New Directions, and the relationship with Kurt ran through the rest of the series. The two married in the season six episode "A Wedding," in a double ceremony alongside Brittany and Santana.

Criss was 23 when he first played the Dalton teenager. He took the title role in "Hedwig and the Angry Inch" on Broadway in 2015, and in 2018 he won a Primetime Emmy for playing Andrew Cunanan in "The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story."

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Glee regularly gave a full hour to one artist's catalog, a format it used for Madonna, Britney Spears, Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, the Beatles and the songs from "The Rocky Horror Picture Show." Those tribute hours became a dependable sales hook for the show's soundtrack business.

"The Power of Madonna," which aired in April 2010, set the template. Madonna granted the production rights to her catalog, and the episode ran almost entirely on her songs, including a shot-for-shot restaging of the "Vogue" video with Sue Sylvester in Madonna's place. The companion EP debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, an unusual result for a release tied to one episode of network television.

Season two opened in September 2010 with "Britney/Brittany," which staged its Spears numbers inside dental anesthesia dream sequences and included a cameo from Spears. A month later came "The Rocky Horror Glee Show," built around the 1975 film's songs and framed as a school production, with Barry Bostwick and Meat Loaf appearing as guests. Season three delivered "Michael" in January 2012, then "Dance With Somebody," a Whitney Houston tribute that aired a little over two months after her death. Season five opened with back-to-back Beatles episodes, "Love, Love, Love" and "Tina in the Sky with Diamonds."

The commercial logic was plain. A tribute hour pulled in listeners who followed the artist but not the series, and it handed the music operation a themed soundtrack to sell rather than a scattered set of unrelated covers. Production design shifted to suit the catalog, which let directors step outside McKinley High's usual visual grammar for an episode.

Critics split on the results. The recurring objection was that story bent to fit the song list, with characters making choices that existed mainly to set up the next number. The episodes kept drawing audiences, so the writers kept building them, treating a famous back catalog as a structural device available in any season.

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Cory Monteith, who played quarterback-turned-glee-club-member Finn Hudson, died in July 2013 at age 31. When Glee dealt with the loss in the season five episode "The Quarterback," the script never said how Finn died, and the cause stayed unstated inside the fictional world.

Monteith died in a Vancouver hotel room. The British Columbia Coroners Service found that a combination of heroin and alcohol caused his death. Those details were reported widely at the time, so the show's silence read as a decision rather than an omission. A storyline built around the same circumstances would have pushed viewers to treat Finn's fictional death as a reenactment of a real one.

"The Quarterback" aired in October 2013 and worked as a tribute instead of a conventional plot episode. It opens with the cast performing "Seasons of Love" from Rent, then picks up weeks after Finn's funeral, with New Directions alumni back at McKinley High. Each number carries a different reaction to the death — anger, denial, guilt — rather than moving a story forward.

Lea Michele had been in a relationship with Monteith when he died. She appears late in the episode as Rachel Berry and sings "Make You Feel My Love." Viewers watched the scene knowing the grief on screen belonged to the actor as much as to the character.

Glee's audience skewed young, and the episode avoided both the specifics of Finn's death and any cautionary framing around it. The funeral has already happened when the hour begins, and the circumstances are never revisited in later episodes either.

Finn Hudson's absence reshaped the rest of the series. He had anchored the show since the pilot, the football player whose move to glee club gave the group its social standing at McKinley. His storylines were divided among the remaining ensemble across the final two seasons, and the character was never recast or replaced. "The Quarterback" sits apart from the rest of Glee: no comic subplot, no resolution and no lesson at the end of the hour.

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Naya Rivera, who played Santana Lopez for all six seasons, drowned in Lake Piru in Ventura County, California, in July 2020 at age 33. She had rented a pontoon boat that afternoon and was swimming with her four-year-old son. Her death had no connection to the series, which had ended five years earlier.

Rivera was reported missing on July 8, 2020, after her son was found alone on the drifting boat. The boy told investigators that his mother pushed him back aboard and then failed to surface. Dive teams and helicopters joined the search, which continued for five days before crews recovered her body on July 13. The Ventura County medical examiner ruled the drowning accidental.

She had worked as an actor since childhood, with a role on the early 1990s sitcom The Royal Family years before she auditioned for Glee. Santana Lopez started out in the pilot as a cheerleader with almost no dialogue, then grew into one of the series' most developed roles. The writers spread her coming-out storyline across several seasons, and her relationship with Brittany Pierce ended in a sixth-season wedding shared with another couple from the glee club. Rivera also carried some of the show's better-known covers, among them Amy Winehouse's "Valerie," which Santana performed at sectionals.

Her career continued after the series wrapped. Rivera published a memoir, Sorry Not Sorry, in 2016. She starred as Collette Jones in the dance drama Step Up: High Water, which began streaming in 2018. She recorded the voice of Catwoman for the animated feature Batman: The Long Halloween, released in 2021, after her death.

Former cast members gathered at Lake Piru in the days after her body was recovered. Her last scenes as Santana aired in the March 2015 series finale, and tributes from fans and co-stars centered on the character's arc from background cheerleader to one of the few Latina lesbian leads on U.S. network television at the time.

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Mark Salling, who played football player and glee club member Noah "Puck" Puckerman across all six seasons, was arrested in December 2015 on suspicion of possessing child sexual abuse material. He pleaded guilty to a federal possession charge in October 2017 and died by suicide in January 2018, weeks before his scheduled sentencing.

The arrest happened in Los Angeles about nine months after the series had already wrapped, so no episode or production schedule was affected by it. Federal prosecutors said investigators pulled tens of thousands of images and hundreds of videos from a computer and a hard drive taken from his home. A 2016 indictment charged him with both receiving and possessing the material, and the receipt count was dropped when he reached a plea agreement the following year.

Terms of that agreement included a multi-year prison sentence, 20 years of supervised release, registration as a sex offender and restitution payments to victims. None of it was ever carried out. Salling died before the sentencing hearing could take place, and with no living defendant the court dismissed the case, leaving the restitution unpaid.

Puck was one of the series' most heavily used characters. He enters the pilot-era story as a bully who throws slushies at the glee club, then joins New Directions, and a season one storyline reveals that he fathered a daughter with cheerleader Quinn Fabray. Salling also worked as a musician away from the show, releasing solo material before and during his run on it.

His case is treated separately from the other losses tied to the cast, because it involved criminal conduct with identifiable victims rather than an accident or a medical cause. It is also the part of the show's history with no clean place in reunion coverage, since Puck appears in close to every episode of a series that streams continuously. Anyone revisiting Glee before the reboot encounters the character long before they encounter the record of what the actor admitted to in federal court.