Glee Gets a Hulu Reboot With Three Stars Missing

Disney+ and Hulu ordered a Glee reboot on October 21, with 20th Television producing and no date, plot, or official cast attached.

The Fox series ran from 2009 to 2015. The new order exists because those weekly covers still stream, and because co-creator Ryan Murphy had already written a script and called around 10 of the old stars.

Disney Ordered Glee With Almost No Details

On October 21 the official Glee account posted the old loser-hand salute and a two-word caption, Currently gleeking out! That was the public announcement. Disney named the studio and the two streaming homes and stopped there.

Currently gleeking out! pic.twitter.com/ckV50OCQ5s

— GLEE (@gleeofficial) October 21, 2026

People who had been waiting for a reunion treated the graphic as a door opening. People who remember how the first run ended treated it as a door they were not sure they wanted opened. Both reactions are fair, because the company left every hard question off the graphic.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The order: Disney+ and Hulu gave Glee a series order on October 21, 2026, with 20th Television producing, 11 years after the Fox finale.
• The writers: Murphy said in September that he, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan had finished a script, the same trio who wrote the first two seasons.
• The calls: Murphy said he had been in touch with around 10 original cast members, that they had a lot of questions, and that they were enthusiastic.
• The library: The original series already streams on Hulu, so the order is for new episodes, not for putting McKinley High online.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The cast list: Disney announced no actors. Returning names so far come from the actors’ own posts or from people close to the production, not from the studio.
• The job sheet: Deals for the creative team were still being finished when the order went out, including who will actually run the series.
• The story: No logline, time jump, or premiere window has been released, and Murphy has said nobody has read the script yet.

A series order with that many blanks is not caution. It is a bet that the brand still sells before anyone has to explain the empty chairs, the workplace history, or how a high-school choir works when the people who made it famous are in their thirties and forties.

The Cover Songs Never Left

Murphy has been saying the quiet part for months. In July he noted that young viewers had found the show again and wondered if it should be revisited. In August he put the reason on the music, saying it meant something to people now in their twenties and that he wanted to kick the idea around. A reboot is a costly way to honor a library title that already sits on Hulu. A reboot is a cheap way, in studio math, to start the old singles machine again.

Fox and Columbia used to put several performances up as digital tracks the week an episode aired. Fans heard Rachel Berry belt a chorus and bought the song before bed. Billboard’s count now stands at 207 Billboard Hot 100 entries for the Glee Cast, still the most by any non-solo act. Luminate’s figures, published with that chart history this week, put U.S. downloads at 48.4 million and official U.S. streams at 4.5 billion. The songs still average 4.1 million monthly listeners on Spotify.

The trick was volume, not radio. Of those 207 hits, 173 spent a single week on the Hot 100. Only three ever reached the top 10. The highest remains the pilot’s cover of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which opened at No. 4 on the chart dated June 6, 2009, on 177,000 U.S. downloads. Journey’s original had peaked at No. 9 in 1981. That is the one Glee cover that outran the record it borrowed.

In 2010, then 20th Century Fox Television music head Geoff Bywater recalled telling Murphy and executive producer Dante Di Loreto what the plan was supposed to yield.

If all works well, we should see records in the top 10 and we should sell albums.

Geoff Bywater, then head of music, 20th Century Fox Television

They got the albums. They also got a touring business that grossed $45.9 million across 53 dates in 2010 and 2011, including a sold-out seven-show run at London’s O2 Arena. Billboard’s 2012 money-makers list put the Glee Cast 11th among U.S. musical acts for 2011, at $12.6 million. Early Fox seasons drew more than 10 million U.S. viewers, and 30-second spots went for as much as $300,000. The new series is not chasing those ad rates on a broadcast night. It is chasing the only part of that machine that never powered down.

HOW THE CHART RECORD STILL STANDS

The 2010 class also dumped 80 songs onto the Hot 100 in a single year, a mark Taylor Swift later approached with 54 in 2023. That pace only works if new episodes keep feeding new tracks. The original run stopped adding Hot 100 titles in October 2013 with a cover of “To Make You Feel My Love.” Twelve years of streaming did not replace the weekly drop. A new series would.

Three Original Stars Cannot Walk Back In

Any return to McKinley High has to be staged around people who will not be there. That is not a tone problem for later. It is the first fact the order cannot rewrite, and it is the first fact replies under the announcement reached for.

Investigation Discovery already walked through this in 2023 with a three-part series, The Price of Glee. A reboot does not get to pretend that film is not on the shelf.

THE CAST THE REBOOT CANNOT REUNITE

1. 2013: Cory Monteith, who played Finn Hudson, dies at 31 from a mix of alcohol and heroin during the original run’s fifth season.
2. 2018: Mark Salling, who played Noah Puckerman, dies by suicide at 35 while awaiting sentencing on federal child pornography charges.
3. July 2020: Naya Rivera, who played Santana Lopez, drowns at 33 at Lake Piru in California after getting her young son back into the boat.

Finn was the football-player center of the early show. Santana became one of its sharpest queer leads and, with Brittany Pierce, one of its lasting couples. Puck was the other half of the first-season engine. A new writers’ room can write around a grave. It cannot ask those three actors to sing.

Chris Colfer, who played Kurt Hummel, said the obvious part out loud before the order even landed. He told an interviewer in early October that he had heard nothing about a reboot and that the work would be hard now that Rivera is gone. He also said Glee fans would come after him with pitchforks and jazz hands if he said no. That is the bind Disney just bought: a choir people still want to hear, minus the voices they will notice first.

Who Has Signaled a Return to McKinley High?

Disney has named no one. Murphy has named no one. In the hours after the graphic went up, a few original stars spoke for themselves, and people close to the production described Lea Michele as already in to play Rachel Berry again. Michele had said in September that she would follow Murphy wherever he goes. Those are not the same kind of yes.

THE SIGNALS SO FAR

• Lea Michele: People close to the production have said she is in as Rachel. Disney has not confirmed it. In September she said, “I will always love Glee. I love Ryan Murphy. It just holds such a special place in my heart for me. I will follow Ryan wherever he goes.”
• Heather Morris: She posted a Cheerios-era photo of Brittany Pierce and wrote, “Yes ladies and gentle men of women, rumors are true. Brittany S Pierce was in fact lost in the sewers for all these years. But I’m here to inform you that she is alive and well…And back for more #Glee.”
• Chord Overstreet: The Sam Evans actor posted, “Reunited and it feels so good!”
• Kevin McHale: The Artie Abrams actor quote-posted a 2020 notice that Drake had passed Glee on the Hot 100 and wrote, “Challenge accepted.” In September he had said he could never refuse if Murphy got the group in a room.
• Chris Colfer: No yes. He has said the show was tough, that Rivera’s death makes it harder, and that he would have to think if more information arrived.

On October 18, four days before the order, Darren Criss brought Colfer onstage at London’s Royal Albert Hall to sing “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” the old Kurt and Blaine bit. That was a concert gag, not a table read. It did show that two of the show’s most watched pairing still share a song in public. Jane Lynch, Matthew Morrison, Amber Riley, Dianna Agron, Jenna Ushkowitz, Harry Shum Jr., and the later-season class have not been announced.

Michele’s name moved faster than the series order itself, which is its own problem. Replies under the announcement went to her before they went to plot, time jumps, or who plays the new kids. Disney is bringing back a star whose off-camera reputation became part of the show’s afterlife. The studio can ignore that in a two-line graphic. It will not be able to ignore it once cameras are booked.

Murphy Finished a Script Nobody Has Read

The creative facts are still thin, and they all run through Murphy. He has a long-running deal inside Disney’s TV shops, and Glee was the broadcast hit that made that career. Falchuk and Brennan were in the room for the seasons people still quote. Murphy has been careful to say the three of them wrote “something,” and equally careful to say the actors have not seen it.

I’ve been in touch with around 10 of the original cast members. It’s very sweet, they all had a lot of questions but they all were very enthusiastic about the idea. Nobody’s read it, so we’ll see. I vowed to myself that I wanted to write a couple of them to see what people think, particularly the cast, because we were very close when we were making it.

Ryan Murphy, co-creator, to Entertainment Tonight

Close is a word that covers a lot of ground on Glee. The series ran 121 episodes across six seasons, won Golden Globes for best television comedy or musical in 2010 and 2011, and took six Emmys, including one for Murphy’s direction of the pilot and one for Lynch as Sue Sylvester. It also became a shorthand for how a young ensemble can be worked until the seams show. A script the cast has not read is a courtesy. It is also a way to keep the hardest plot questions, including how to handle Finn, Santana, and Puck, off the first press cycle.

The original finale already jumped to 2020. Rachel won a Tony. Kurt and Blaine used her as a surrogate. If the new series picks up those adults, it is a reunion with new kids in the choir room. If it resets at McKinley, it is a cover of a cover. Murphy has not said which, and Disney did not make him.

Drake Now Holds the Chart Glee Built

McHale’s “Challenge accepted” only works if the new show can do what the old one did on a clock that no longer exists. In January 2020, Drake passed the Glee Cast for the most Hot 100 hits. Drake now has 407 Hot 100 hits. Taylor Swift has 281. Future has 246. Glee’s 207 still ranks fourth, and first among groups, but the gap is no longer a weekend of iTunes drops.

The 2009 model sold 99-cent souvenirs of an episode that had just aired on Fox. A 2026 Disney+ and Hulu series drops into a bundle, a For You page, and a chart that runs on streams, not on the 18 hours after a Tuesday night. Weekly covers can still travel. They do not automatically land 177,000 downloads before breakfast.

That is the wager inside the thin press release. The catalog already pays. New episodes would exist to mint new tracks, pull the same young viewers Murphy keeps mentioning, and give 20th Television another title in a house that now owns the old Fox library. The people who can actually walk onto that soundstage are a smaller set than the opening credits of season one, and the three who cannot walk on at all are not extras.

Morris already wrote Brittany out of the sewers and back into the show. Colfer still has to decide whether jazz hands are a good enough reason. The graphic on October 21 did not have to name anyone. The first episodes will.