Ryan Murphy Fills FOX With “Glee”

Ryan Murphy, creator of Nip/Tuck and Popular, is back with a new series, and it looks to be another winner. But with Glee — making a sneak preview debut May 19 after the final performance show of this season’s American Idol, then returning to air regularly in the fall — don’t look for the same of what made those first two shows hits.

“I’ve done sort of eight years of darkness and really adult stuff [with Nip/Tuck],” Murphy recently told reporters on a conference call, “and I was like, ‘Okay, I want to try something different. I want to do a show that has a bigger heart and is kinder. But make no mistake — it still has an edge.”

But the high school-set musical comedy series won’t have quite the edge of Murphy’s former high-school show, Popular.

“It’s a completely different tone,” he said. “The thing with Popular was [it] was a satire that made fun of everything else on the network [The CW] at the time — which they never apparently got — and they wanted me to do some sort of Dawson’s Creek-esque thing, and I didn’t want to, and that show was about ambition. … I always thought that [Popular] was sort of a culty, darker thing that had a very cynical tone to it, and I don’t think [Glee] does at all, and I’ve been very careful not to really try and cross-pollinate the ideas of that show with this. This is not a show you’d find on The CW.”

The idea behind Glee is that Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison), an optimistic young teacher, offers to take on the huge task of restoring McKinley High School’s Glee Club to its former glory. But it’s a tall order — the members of the struggling club include a group of misfits, from a nerdy soprano to a diva-in-training to a geeky guitarist. Will’s hope lies with two true talents, Rachel (Lea Michele) and Finn (Cory Monteith), who happens to be a popular quarterback and wants to protect his reputation with his girlfriend and his teammates. Jane Lynch (Best in Show) is also among the cast as the cheerleading coach.

The show is a lot of fun, with plenty of rollicking numbers that draw from songs past and present (FYI: You Journey fans will want to be sure to watch this preview episode), but is not your typical musical — which is what Murphy intended.

“I was interested in doing a musical,” he said, “but I wanted to do sort of a post-modern musical. [FOX] was not interested in, and neither was I, doing a show where people suddenly burst into song. That’s not how I wanted to do it. I said, ‘Look, if they’re going to sing, there’s going to be three rules. It will be done where they’re on stage rehearsing or performing, or whether they’re in the rehearsal room, or it will sort of be in that fantasy that has been routed on stage, and you realize that they were performing it in their head, or performing it out to the auditorium the entire time. I think that gave it some sort of life and structure, and I think that makes it more accessible to people.”

Making it even more accessible are the songs that the glee club uses, which are so varied that people of all ages and tastes will likely find something familiar — or new — to like.

“With every episode, we do between five and eight music numbers,” said Murphy, “and my goal is to really try and give the audience something for everybody. We have a hip-hop. We have an R&B. We have a Top 40. We have Country. … I was very inspired by the American Idol idea just because I think the key is to do songs that people know and interpret them in a different and unusual way, and I think that’s what that show has done, and why that show is such a hit.”

With American Idol serving has somewhat of an inspiration, it is probably fitting that Glee previews after the May 19 episode of Idol. But in a bold move, Glee will then vanish from the schedule, and begin airing as a regular series four months later, in the fall. And while Murphy was at first concerned about this, he was assuaged by FOX’s reasoning.

“They’re calling it a preview. And I keep saying it’s like having a movie trailer before the movie Titanic. It’s just a great way to get as many eyeballs to sample your show as possible, and the thing that sold me is that it’s airing after the ultimate episode of American Idol this summer, but then it’s immediately going to be made available to people all summer long. You can buy it and download it off the Internet, the pilot episode, and also … we’re going to have music available starting in August. We’re going to be teasing some big numbers that come up in the show. … It’s just about slowly getting people to be aware of the show in a way that I think is very original … selling it all summer and slowly teasing stuff … and I like it because there’s no other fall show that will have that.”

Speaking of the music, as you might expect there will be songs and albums from the series available at some point. “We’re in the midst of dealing with a soundtrack,” said Murphy. “FOX has been so gracious as to give us sort of scheduled music hiatus where we can take a couple days and catch up and produce demos and have the kids come in and record them … because there’s going to be a series of albums, where I think we’ll probably put out an album every couple of months because we will have so much material. Then we’re going to have all the songs, when you watch the show, available that night on iTunes.”

High-school kids singing? A series of potential album and iTunes hits? If that all sounds familiar, and you want to start drawing comparisons between Glee and High School Musical, Murphy would like you to think again.

“I have never seen High School Musical,” he said. “I know the conceit of it, and I know kind of what it’s about. I certainly know the cast, but I’ve never watched it. But I admire it. I think that what they’ve done is fantastic, but we were never trying to do anything like that. I was trying to do something that was much more like a musical version of the sort of movies that I loved. … High school is the metaphor. High school is not actually what it’s about, if that makes any sense.”

But is any of it about Murphy’s own days in high-school musical theater?

“There were three writers, and two of us were [in musical theater], and one of us wasn’t. What I like about that is the one that wasn’t is always like, ‘Wait, this really happens?’ We were like, ‘Yes.’ He’s like, ‘Well, nobody will believe that.’ So it’s through the prism of, for the most part, the writers’ experience.

“What I love — what I remember about that time when I was doing all those shows is that I grew up in Indiana. But when you do get the lead in something, or you’re performing, you sort of feel that the world is suddenly available to you, and you have so much optimism about what you can become. And it doesn’t even have to be about being a performer. It’s just a belief in yourself, and I remember that feeling, and it was very important to me. And that’s what I wanted the show to be about, so I do draw on that experience that I had.”

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© 2009 Fox Broadcasting Co. Credit: Matthias Clamer