Calling all Gleeks, it is time to dust off your cheer uniforms and grab your slushies. The news is official: “Glee” is getting rebooted. The Fox comedy television show, based on midwestern high school show choir, is returning to air eleven years after its end. In late Sept. 2026, producer Ryan Murphy confirmed he had finalized the script for a “Glee” reboot on top of being in contact with ten of the original cast members. For those who have not watched “Glee” and felt spiritually connected to one or more plot points, you might not understand why the internet is breaking over this news. For pop culture, “Glee” is much more than a show; it is a cultural phenomenon.
In May 2009, the first episode of the show aired on Fox. It is a musical based comedy focused on an underfunded glee club at William McKinley High School in Lima, Ohio. The show follows the students in the club as they navigate typical high school issues, all while breaking into covers of your favorite 2000s radio hits at least twice an episode. Despite its unserious, comedic nature, “Glee” is much deeper than the “jocks versus geeks” plotline that has been overplayed in the media for ages. The show targeted issues like teen pregnancy, bullying, sexuality, race, mental health, disability, and a long list of other massively important topics that were scarcely covered in pop culture at the time of its airing. When same sex marriage became legalized across all fifty states in 2015, “Glee” had already been addressing homosexuality, homophobia, and discrimination for six seasons. Although it was not the first show to introduce LGBTQ+ characters, it was one of the first to address queer sexuality among teenagers, contributing to what made it such a cultural phenomenon.
The show featured a plethora of common teenage experiences, like Mercedes Jones’ struggle with body image, Santana Lopez’s fight with homophobia, Kurt Hummel’s throws with bullying, Quinn Fabray’s teen pregnancy; the list goes on. For such a hugely popular show to introduce these issues in a youth-based fashion, it made struggling adolescents everywhere feel accepted, represented and visible.
So, if “Glee” was so culturally important, why hasn’t it been rebooted sooner? In 2020, Ryan Murphy took to social media to tease the potential of a “Glee” reboot he had in mind, in which Lea Michele, formerly Rachel Berry, and Ben Platt, made famous for his role in Broadway’s “Dear Evan Hansen,” took over the McKinley glee club. Michele has been open about her love for Murphy and his work. However, Platt was more skeptical, saying “Glee” needed to be “left alone.” For years, there has been a large conversation online surrounding how to properly execute a potential “Glee” reboot. In 2013, during the shows production, Cory Monteith, otherwise known as Finn Hudson, sadly passed away at age 31 following a long struggle with drug addiction. “The Quarterback” (Season 5, Episode 3) pays tribute to Monteith in an extremely emotional manner, reflecting not only the characters’ grief in the show, but also the true mourning of the cast members losing Cory so suddenly. After the show ended in 2015, the cast experienced two other major losses, with Mark Salling (Noah “Puck” Puckerman) passing by suicide in 2018, and Naya Rivera (Santana Lopez) passing following a drowning tragedy in 2020. With every one of these late actors and their characters being so important to the plotline of the original show, the conversation about how to properly execute a reboot becomes tricky, hence Platt’s comment. From the original cast, Lea Michele, Heather Morris (Brittany S. Pierce), and Chord Overstreet (Sam Evans) have confirmed their involvement in the reboot, while Kevin McHale (Artie Abrams), Jane Lynch (Sue Sylvester), Chris Colfer (Kurt Hummel), Jenna Ushkowitz (Tina Cohen-Chang), and Matthew Morrison (Will Schuester) have been teasing their involvement across social media platforms.
Despite the controversies surrounding Ryan Murphy’s reboot announcement, the internet is still interested to see where it will take the plotline. There is no denying the iconic, witty, edgy humor the show brought to primetime television, and the references from Glee that are still extremely popular in meme culture today. The “Glee” Cast has 4.2 million monthly listeners on Spotify, with songs like “Somewhere Only We Know” and “Bust Your Windows” with hundreds of millions of streams. As of now, there is no confirmed release date for the “Gleeboot,” but Disney Plus and Hulu have announced it will be streaming on both of their platforms. Gleeks everywhere, get prepared for more of McKinley High.