Ryan Murphys Passion Is Back For Glee: Plus Season 3 Spoilers For Cast And Songs

Ray Richmond is contributing to Deadline’s TV coverage. Co-creator Ryan Murphy is coming off a sophomore season of Glee that drew gripes from fans and a controversy surrounding his commentsabout stars Lea Michele, Chris Colfer, and Cory Monteith. Now,Ryanis ready to make amends. “This year, the idea is just to run the show,” he said this afternoon after a screening of Glee‘s 3rd season premiere.”Last year was a new thing for me. I’d run television shows before, but I’d never run a business before. It was a weird thing.” Now the focus is “on makingthisthe best year we’veever done.And in fact, we thinkthat’sexactly what we’regoing to have. Part of the reason for that is we’ve figured out the best way to shoot the show, and a way to do itmoreeconomically for Fox.” Added Murphy: “I have my passion forit back. And you can see the excitement on the set.The actors I feel are really renewed and excited and are thrilled to be there. It’s funagain. You know, things took a bit of a nasty turn,but I feel greatabout it again.” Theseason opener, which airs Tuesday, features Lindsay Pearce — one of the 4 finalists on the Oxygen reality series The Glee Project. Pearce is playing a major roleduring Season 3… SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! … asthe leader of a rival singing group to New Directions. She’ll continue to recur as a nemesis to Rachel (Michele) in several episodes. Her big first music number is singing “Anything You Can Do“ from Annie Get Your Gun. Murphy told reporters that it occurred to him after the part already had been written that Pearce would be perfect for it — but had to shoot her first episode before The Glee Project finale had aired. “We kept delaying doing it so it wouldn’t leak.”The Glee Project‘s two winners, Damian McGinty and Sam Larsen, also will appear in significant story arcs on the show later this fall … SPOILER ALERT! SPOILER ALERT! … with McGinty portraying “a foreign exchange student shacking up with Brittany (Heater Morris), and she of course believes him to be a leprechaun with magical powers”. McGinty “isn’t an actor,” Murphy acknowledged, “but he did great. On his first day he got shoved into a locker like 25 times” but came through it well. Larsen will appear in “somewhere around Episode 10 or 11,” Murphy added. So with Michele, Colfer, and Monteith’s charactersgraduating from high school at the end of this coming season, how will they be integrated into the series’ high-school setting? “There are lots of things they could do,” Murphy told Deadline. “They could become teachers. They could become college students. There are very organicways you could keep them on the show, and keep them big, and keep the audience invested in them… But the show is always going to be about that choir room.” As for doing a spinoff,the producers will revisit the idea in the spring. “We would do discussions of it much differently than we handled it before,” Murphy said.

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