Glee plans tribute episode to Cory Monteith

One week after Cory Monteith’s tragic death, Glee creator Ryan Murphy has spoken out about his friend and the painful decisions faced about how to resolve the character of Finn.

Glee will return for its fifth season in the US in late September, now one week later than originally planned, for three episodes, It will then take an “extended hiatus” to regroup.

Here are some excerpts from his interview with E!Online.

I know Cory was a friend. How are you holding up?
Ryan Murphy: It’s hard to even explain how personally upsetting it is. You know, we were a group of people who went through something that happens once in a lifetime, and I was close to Cory and Lea and I was also someone who was very involved in wanting to get Cory sober. We had an incident in March, which has been reported on, where we found out he was using again and staged an intervention in my office with a lot of appropriate people. He wanted to continue working and we said, ‘That’s not an option. No. The TV show doesn’t matter, your life matters.’ So we booked a rehab and a facility and Cory has always been, always was, a strong-willed and very sweet child and I always said, he felt like an older son to me. He and I had a very interesting, once-in-a-lifetime relationship, so I was very surprised that he went so readily.

His last words to me were, “I want to get better,” and I always felt and continue to feel even in his death that he did, that he really wanted to fight it and he was humiliated and shamed. We reassured him that the only thing that mattered was him getting better and his job was 100 percent protected because he thought he was going to get fired. That has been feeding into all of this, why it’s so shocking and so debilitating and tragically sad because we were all rooting for him and trying to help him in every way that we could, so it feels even more devastating. It also feels in some weird way like I failed, even though I know that that’s the plight of addicts, so what can you do? But it’s just really hard and really upsetting. I feel like we did everything that we could and I know that Lea feels she did everything that she could.

How did you decide what to do with the show?
Once you’re faced with this situation, which is devastating…There’s really no way to win in this situation. So our position was, do we go off the air permanently? Do we go off the air until November? Do we start shooting again in January? But the thing that we ultimately found was that our cast and crew wanted to be together, they wanted to go back to work, they wanted to sort of be in a place where they could all remember and discuss Cory sooner than later. As for me, I really had no set opinion. I was willing to do what people wanted.

What is the plan for the first few episodes back?
We had two episodes that we finished writing in May that were our Beatles tributes that we we’ve been working on for four years, so those were already done. With some slight modifications, we decided, ‘OK, let’s shoot these. Let’s get people back and then let’s take the time to write and deal with a tribute to Cory,’ which I guess we’re going to do for episode three and then after that episode airs, we’re going to go off the air for a while and take a little hiatus and figure out what is the future of the show. But for now, what we just decided to do is continue on working for the next month so people could really deal with this and not feel isolated and alone. That’s something Lea felt strongly about and she really is the one making those decisions. We followed her lead.

Did you really consider ending the show for good?
Yes. If Lea had said to me, ‘I could never do this again and I don’t want to do this again,’ you know, she is sort of the show, so what do you do? And I would’ve, out of respect to her as a person, said ‘OK,’ but that’s not how Lea operates; that’s not how she feels. She’s handled this with so much humanity and grace and she’s also handled this in a way where she’s trying to look out for 500 other people affected by him and who have mortgages to pay and families to feed. That was never on the table for her and I said, ‘OK.’ Nothing has been done and will be done in terms of any of the material without Lea blessing it and making sure it’s OK with her—and she has been.

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