‘Glee’ Is Coming Back: Disney+ and Hulu Give Ryan Murphy’s Reboot a Series Order

Television’s nostalgia boom has reached the choir room. Over the past year, beloved shows from earlier eras have been dusted off for new audiences, and one of the most talked-about candidates has been a revival of ‘Glee.’ For months, the idea lingered somewhere between wishful thinking and studio chatter.

The original show earned its place in pop culture history. ‘Glee’ aired on Fox from 2009 to 2015, running for 6 seasons, 121 episodes and more than 729 musical performances, and it picked up 6 Primetime Emmys and 4 Golden Globes. Its covers of pop hits and Broadway standards also landed more than 200 songs on the Billboard Hot 100.

Now the ‘Glee’ reboot is officially happening. Disney+ and Hulu have given a series order to the new ‘Glee’ from 20th Television, 17 years after the original launched on Fox. No details about the logline, production schedule or returning cast have been revealed yet.

The green light came quickly. In late September, co-creator Ryan Murphy told Entertainment Tonight at an ‘American Horror Story’ event that he had just finished the script, which he wrote with the show’s other co-creators, Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, who also wrote the first 2 seasons alongside him. He added that nobody had read it yet and that he wanted to hear what the cast thought.

Murphy had been teasing a comeback for months. Earlier this year, he told People he was seriously considering a reboot, and he told Good Morning America that he’d been quietly talking to people from the show about whether they should do it.

It remains unclear how the 3 creators will divide up showrunning duties, or whether a new showrunner will step in, as happened on ‘Love Story.’ The series order also didn’t confirm whether the new ‘Glee’ will be a continuation, a reimagining or something in between.

Murphy said he had been in touch with around 10 original cast members and that they were very enthusiastic, although he didn’t name anyone. Lea Michele, who played Rachel Berry for all 6 seasons, has said she would be glad to come back, and Jane Lynch, who played Sue Sylvester, has said she would be very happy to do it.

Not everyone has signaled the same certainty. Chris Colfer, who played Kurt Hummel, said in early October that he knew nothing about the revival and had heard nothing, and he noted that the show would be hard to do now that Naya Rivera is gone. The original cast also included Matthew Morrison, Amber Riley, Darren Criss, Kevin McHale, Jenna Ushkowitz and more, so the potential reunion list is long.

Any new version of ‘Glee’ will carry the weight of what happened behind the scenes. The show lost its star Cory Monteith in 2013, a loss that led Murphy to end the series after its sixth season, and it later lost Rivera as well. Murphy has previously said that if he could do it again, the production would have stopped for a very long time after Monteith’s death.

That history will shape how the reboot is received. A project that leans on the original cast has to balance celebration with respect for those who are no longer here, and it will need to find a tone that works for viewers who grew up with the show as well as a new generation.

There is also a built-in audience. All 6 seasons of the original have been streaming on Disney+ and Hulu since June 2022, which has introduced the show to younger viewers and kept it in circulation. Pairing the reboot with those same platforms makes strategic sense for Disney.

For now, the order confirms that the McKinley High story isn’t finished. The creative team is back together, a script exists, and the next steps are casting and production. Whether the New Directions return as adults, a new class takes the stage or the story goes somewhere entirely different, ‘Glee’ is about to find its voice again.

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