Today, Matthew Morrison is synonymous with William Schuster, the music-loving teacher at the center of Glee. But we almost got a very different version of this educator. On the first episode of the Glee podcast And That’s What You REALLY Missed, series co-creator and executive producer Ryan Murphy revealed the dark and surprising truth behind Mr. Schue.
2008 was an odd time for Murphy. The creator had one of the flashiest shows on cable with Nip/Tuck, but his passion project at the time, Pretty/Handsome, was not picked up by FX for fear that advertisers wouldn’t support a show about a transgender woman. As Murphy and Fox executive Dana Walden were brainstorming what Murphy’s next project would be, the producer was given a script written by Ian Brennan while he was at the gym. That script and Murphy’s own desire to write a musical became the starting point for Glee.
“In Ian’s original script, it was a very dark comedy that had the idea of it,” Murphy said in the podcast’s first episode. “Ian and I were both in choir. And Mr. Schue, I believe, was a crystal meth addict in Ian’s script.”
“Wasn’t he also doing, wasn’t he touching the children or something?” Kevin McHale, one of And That’s What You REALLY Missed‘s cohosts, asked.
“Yes,” Murphy said. This version of Glee was similar to the Reese Witherspoon’s black comedy Election. “But like the NC-17 version of show choir but like with a weird protagonist who was unraveling.”
Mr. Schue was eventually cleaned up as the show became more about a group fo scrappy underdogs discovering themselves and chasing their dreams. But that wasn’t the only bomb Murphy dropped about Mr. Schue. “I’ve never really talked about this. That pilot was written for Justin Timberlake. Mr. Schue was written for Justin,” Murphy said in the final minutes of the episode.
Just let that sink in for a moment. Suddenly, Mr. Schue’s questionable hair, love of vests, and general corniness makes complete sense. He was supposed to go to “SexyBack”-era Justin Timberlake.
You know how every episode of Glee had about a hundred jaw-dropping moments to the point where you didn’t know which insane thing to focus on? That’s the energy McHale and Jenna Ushkowitz’s podcast is bringing in its very first episode. Over the course of an hour and 15 minutes, Murphy revealed that there was one unnamed executive who routinely called Glee the f-word show, at least one executive used to make fun of Murphy’s voice during meetings, and that there was talk of a spinoff series all about The Warblers. Murphy even found the time to repeatedly apologize for being an “absentee father” to his Glee cast. Forget whatever’s going on at Discovery+. One episode in and this is already the heartfelt and honest Glee deep-dive fans have been craving for years.
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