Preparing their slushies for battle. The Price of Glee docuseries claims to unpack the highs and lows of the hit Fox series – but that doesn’t mean the show’s cast members want anything to do with it.
“There’s somebody out there who’s trying desperately to put together a documentary or a tell-all or something or other who keeps contacting us relentlessly,” Becca Tobin, who portrayed Kitty Wilde, revealed on an August 2022 episode of “Everything Iconic With Danny Pellegrino” podcast. “Here’s the thing though, this is why it will never happen. It doesn’t matter what happened on that set. At the end of the day, it’s a family. It’s like a big dysfunctional family and there is a loyalty there. Like mob mentality. Where I’m like I don’t care how much I hated this person at work. There’s something that runs so deep in my blood that I could hate you so much, but I don’t hate you enough. I don’t hate us enough to go do that.”
Discovery+ announced it would be dropping a docuseries about the musical comedy, which aired from 2009 to 2015, in October 2022. The 3-part event, set to air in January 2023, was crafted to examine the “dark side of the series on and off-screen,” with a look at the sudden deaths of three of the series’ leads – Naya Rivera (Santana Lopez), Cory Monteith (Finn Hudson) and Mark Salling (Noah “Puck” Puckerman).
Jason Sarlanis, Discovery’s President of Crime and Investigative Content, Linear and Streaming, released a statement at the time about the motivation behind bringing the series to life.
“While celebrating the show’s indelible mark on pop culture and its unprecedented success, The Price of Glee takes a hard look at the intense pressure that results from being catapulted into superstardom and sheds new light on the terrible tragedies that befell the cast and crew of Glee,” his official statement read.
The series trailer, which was released in December 2022 and promised to take an “unbiased” look behind the scenes, teased that the cast of Glee had participated in the documentary interviews to some degree. However, many of the actors haven spoken out against the project, denying that they were associated with it in any way.
In November 2022, Jenna Ushkowitz and Kevin McHale, who played Tina Cohen-Chang and Artie Abrams, respectively, announced their own Glee rewatch podcast, titled, “And That’s What You Really Missed.” The pair told BuzzFeed that they created the podcast because they wanted to focus on “the good moments” that occurred off-screen and the “joy it really did bring us.”
“In terms of the Discovery+ documentary, it feels even more important, to me at least, to do the podcast because we were the ones who were there. And we were the ones experiencing this. And we know what really happened,” Ushkowitz told the outlet. “So, you know, for me, it feels even more pertinent to actually be the ones to share our experience when people are sharing experiences that they didn’t have.”
McHale, for his part, told In Touch in December 2022 that he and the Hello Again star would only correct inaccuracies in the docuseries “if we feel like we need to” or “if there’s anything glaring.”
“You don’t necessarily want to give something more attention than it maybe deserves or needs,” he said. “But we’ll see. Us and all of our friends have nothing to do with it, so we’ll see what happens.”
That same month, the True Blood alum referred to the project as “trash” via social media.
“Show me this ‘cast’ you speak of,” he demanded in response to a Tweet claiming the actors were involved in the docuseries. “This was the nice version, ftr. Don’t make me speak on this again.”
Keep scrolling to see who else from the Glee cast has spoken out against the Discovery+ series:
