Gleeful!

Gleeful!

Chapter 1

Glee is Outed

When the pilot episode for Glee aired on May 29, 2009, in the prime ratings spot following American Idol, Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk, and Ian Brennan anxiously awaited the public's reaction. The three creators of the show simply didn't know what to expect. So would America take to their darkly comedic vision of an all-singing, all-dancing band of social misfits? Would they see it for the hilarious, original show it was, or take it for a High School Musical rip-off? And most important of all, would they want to see more?

At first, Murphy wasn't sure about the post-Idol time slot. He could see the merit in putting the two music shows together as much of the audience was bound to cross over. But Glee wasn't officially planned to premiere until September 2009--three months after American Idol. He spoke with Terry Gross on National Public Radio about hearing the news for the first time from the executives at Fox. "And I said: 'Well, I don't know.' That seems a little scary to me because, you know, then the show will be off the air for three months. It doesn't make sense to me."

Luckily, Murphy got over his reservations and the planned pilot went ahead. It had to be edited down to fit the forty-seven-minute window after Idol, but as far as the taster that the audience had? They loved it. Unequivocally. Glee was an instant hit, and audiences hadn't even seen a full episode yet.

But Murphy and Falchuk were no strangers to television success. Murphy was already an experienced television producer. Born in 1966 in Indianapolis, Indiana, he was the precocious child of a housewife mother and semipro hockey-player dad. He came out to his parents when he was fifteen years old, but his dad had already been bemused by some of his son's earliest quirks--like asking for a subscription to Vogue magazine when he was five years old, not to mention his growing love of musical theater. "My dad would look at me and go, 'What the hell? I don't know who you are! How did you come out of me?' He would say things like that," Murphy recalled. But he was fully accepted by his parents and never experienced any of the taunting that many gay kids have to endure in high school. Instead he was popular and well liked. He sang in his church choir--an experience that would inform him down the line with Glee--and performed in as many of his school's musical theater performances as possible.

After graduating from college, Murphy started his first job as a journalist, working as the entertainment reporter in Hollywood for the Miami Herald. He ended up staying out in Los Angeles and worked for the Los Angeles Times and Entertainment Weekly. Eventually he realized that he wanted to be on the other side of the business--actually scripting the shows, not just writing about them. His first script, Why Can't I Be Audrey Hepburn?, was bought by Steven Spielberg, although it was never made. It was a remarkable launch into the biz.

By 1999, Murphy broke into television with the teen comedy series, Popular. The show was about two girls on opposite ends of the popularity spectrum forced to live together when their single parents meet each other and marry. Popular became something of a cult hit, although it never fully took off with mainstream audiences.

In fact, it was Murphy's former career as a journalist that helped create his biggest hit show pre-Glee. He was asked to go undercover and write an article about plastic surgery in Beverly Hills. Although he was fully prepared to write a sarcastic piece on how people get sucked into making drastic changes to their bodies, when he actually met the doctor, he himself started to fall for the sales pitch.

The result of the meeting was not an article--in fact, Murphy never wrote it--but the kernel of an idea. And what came out of that idea was Nip/Tuck, an hour-long TV drama that revealed the sinister side of plastic surgery. The show's signature line--"Tell me what you don't like about yourself"--was precisely what the doctor that Murphy visited had said to him, and the line quickly embedded itself in American popular culture. Nip/Tuck enjoyed a run of seven seasons, ending on March 3, 2010, and it became well known for its graphic depictions of plastic surgeries.

Murphy insisted on the violence of the surgeries being as realistic as possible but to warn squeamish viewers, he played a specific musical track so that people would know when the gory stuff was on its way: "[The surgeries are] horrific, and violent, and scary, and to the point that you know we devise the show for the audience," he said, live on air on National Public Radio. "You know a surgery is coming when you have a Bang & Olufsen CD player; when they open up that CD player to put that CD in because we always score those surgeries to pop music. A lot of people say to me 'I know that's where I have to either fast-forward through or I'll turn away, or I'll go into the kitchen and get something to eat because the surgeries are pretty in your face.' "

Brad Falchuk interviewed with Ryan Murphy for a role on Nip/Tuck and came aboard as one of the writers. Together they formed a close partnership, which also saw them write a pilot for a TV series about transsexuals called Pretty/Handsome although this was never picked up by a network. With Nip/Tuck winding down, they started the hunt for their next script, something a bit more lighthearted this time around. "We jokingly say [Nip/Tuck] is set over the big mouth of the gates of hell," said Murphy. "It's so dark. And I wanted to do something more hopeful because everybody thinks I'm such a dark person and I really feel that I'm not . . . I think that now people maybe want something that makes [them] smile and feel good." What's more, he was looking for a project where he could share his love of music. He was already embarking on an ambitious filmmaking project, bringing the bestselling book Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert to life on the big screen with Julia Roberts. "Everybody thinks I'm the dark prince of television," he commented to Billboard.com. "But I was at a point where I wanted to do something light. I've always been very into music, and I wanted to show that."

In fact, their timing couldn't have been better for actor and first-time screenwriter Ian Brennan, who was based out of Chicago and New York. He studied theater at Loyola University Chicago and worked with the Goodman and Steppenwolf theater companies in Chicago (another Steppenwolf alum is Glee star Jane Lynch). Brennan had enjoyed small success in the acting world and appeared in the play The Man in the White Suit (2005).

But something kept drawing him back to his memories of high school or, more specifically, his high-school Glee Club. Brennan attended Prospect High School in Mt. Prospect, just outside Chicago, in the 1990s and was an active member of the show choir. In fact, he loathed the experience and only joined because he wanted to be an actor--and the same teacher who oversaw show choir cast all the parts in their amateur theater. "[O]ur show choir performances were things that I just wanted to survive. I have one hilarious videotape where I'm in a terrible tuxedo, and my hair is awful, and I'm zitty and way too thin," he told the Chicago Tribune.

Nevertheless, something about the emotional highs and lows, the highly choreographed dance moves and the overly-sequined outfits struck a chord with Brennan and he realized there was a great story to be uncovered, one that had never been told before. Sure, movies such as Bring It On (2000) had glamorized competitive cheerleading while Drumline (2002) showcased marching bands, but there was nothing of the kind about show choir. The kids who joined show choir were unique; they were all searching for something, a place to express themselves through song and dance on a glitzy stage a world away from their perhaps humdrum lives. "I find it interesting that there is something in everybody, a longing for something transcendent, particularly in a place like Mt. Prospect, a place that's very suburban and normal and plain. Even in places like that, there's this desire to shine. That's fascinating and very funny to me, especially when people try to accomplish this through show choir--which, to me, is inherently a little ridiculous," he observed.

It was an opportunity Brennan knew he had to seize before someone else got there first--"I figured if I didn't write it, someone else would, and then I'd always be kicking myself."

So, in August 2005, he went out to the bookstore, purchased Screenwriting for Dummies, and got straight to work. "I had never written much besides some sketch stuff in high school and some terrible plays in college," he later admitted. Obviously that didn't hold him back, and he penned what would turn out to be the very first incarnation of Glee . . . a movie.

With the benefit of hindsight and knowing how successful Glee has become, you might be forgiven for thinking that Brennan would have had no trouble selling his script, which "featured teacher-student sex and a character addicted to Demerol." The reality was that he shopped the concept for nearly two years without a single bite of interest. Eventually, he partnered up with a friend, Mike Novack, who happened to belong to the same gym as Ryan Murphy. Novack offered the script to Murphy saying, "I don't know you, but I know your work, but I'm taking a guess that you were in Glee Club . . . My partner Ian [Brennan] and I have an idea for a movie that we would want you to produce."