Ryan Murphy Talks About What To Expect For Glee Season Four
Posted by Joseph Lee on 09.22.2012
When will the Grease episode go down?
In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Ryan Murphy revealed details about season four of Glee as well as what viewers can expect. Here are highlights:
On this season's Grease musical: "Grease is episodes five and six. Some of the things that people have always remarked to me that they love is when we do the musicals, elections and graduation, so we'll probably always be doing those three things every year and rooting [the show] in events. I loved West Side Story and last year, I think we got off on a tangent where perhaps we did too much Broadway stuff and did too much stuff that was unknown to our audience. I personally enjoyed it but I know a lot of people did not know those songs. We were very careful this year to say, "OK, let's do something that parents can watch with their kids; what would that musical be?" It would be Grease. We all grew up with Grease and kids still watch it and love it. That's an example of things we're trying to do on the show to make it a little more broad appeal to family viewing and a little less niche. That's been a real concerted effort and I think it's paid off."
On the challenges of the new format: "The easiest thing to do in this show, and this show is about first times, that's why high school shows at their best work because you're following characters who are going through first times in their lives. In Year 3, we were getting a little slow on what were the first times, because they had had so many of them: dated, lost virginity, won glee club Nationals, etc. But with some of them growing up and going to college and moving to New York, there's a whole next big set of first times and for our new crop coming in, they're experiencing their first times in a very different way than the other crop did. We wanted to make sure that Marley, Jake and Kitty, on first blush, it'd be very easy to say, "That's the new Rachel, Puck and Quinn," but they're very different. When you get into around episodes 5, 6 and 7, you see that they have very different issues and things going on than the graduating senior group did."
On doing a second Britney Spears tribute: "No, that was my idea. They never asked me at all. The first episode, we had Britney's cooperation and she was in it and had approvals and I never wanted to do that again. I thought it would be interesting to do another tribute to her simply because it was a big hit for us but to do it in a different way. I like doing tributes the way we do in this episode; what's more important are following the characters' stories or doing another fantasy number or some of that razzmatazz stuff. I suggested it and network liked it because of the Britney tie-in but it was a different way of doing it. I don't know if she's seen the episode and I really admire her. I hope she would like it but it was meant to be another type of love letter to her. What Brittany says about her at the end is that Britney Spears' career is about resiliency and that's what we say."
