Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Price Of Glee’ On Discovery+, A Docuseries About The Pressures, Darkness And Deaths Surrounding The Hit Series

The Price Of Glee is a three-part docuseries that examines how the pressures of working on Glee, the megahit 2009-15 Fox series produced by Ryan Murphy, led to a lot of darkness on set. This darkness is mostly examined via the rise of the mostly unknown cast into megastars as the show rocketed in popularity, but also through the death of Cory Monteith, who played Finn Hudson until his death in 2013, between seasons four and five.

THE PRICE OF GLEE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An ominous quote by Ryan Murphy from a 2016 EW interview: ““What started off as being such a great celebration of love and acceptance ultimately became about darkness and death.”

The Gist: Of course, Monteith isn’t the only member of the young cast who has passed away since the show began: Mark Salling (who played Puck) hung himself in 2018 after being indicted on child pornography charges, and Naya Rivera (who played Santana) drowned in 2020 while saving her 5-year-old son from drowning in Lake Piru. All three stars’ deaths will be examined to some degree during the three-part series.

But most of the first two parts concentrate on Monteith, who had a troubled childhood and a history with addiction, but was clean by the time he got the part of Finn. But the massive and sudden fame the show brought, the constant 16-hour days and the inadequacy he felt because he didn’t sing and dance like the rest of the cast took a toll on him, as we find out from various crew members, his roommate Justin Neil, and friends like Stephen Kramer Glickman.

One of the most shocking revelations is by Dugg Kirkpatrick, one of the lead hairstylists for the series; he more than implied that Lea Michele, the striving star who played Rachel Berry and was dating Monteith at the time of his death, didn’t exactly discourage him from drinking at a party a few months before his accidental overdose death at a hotel in Vancouver.

The third part talks more about Rivera and Salling, as well as other deaths among the show’s crew; the brother of the show’s gaffer, who he brought on set as his assistant (i.e. best boy) committed suicide, and others had premature deaths from natural causes. But the show comes back to Rivera’s death, talking to her father George about his communication with her on the day she drowned, plus a reporter did some investigation into just what might have happened.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We’re reaching back a lot of years with this one, but The Price Of Glee reminds us of an E! True Hollywood Story documentary about Diff’rent Strokes that aired back in 1998. In both cases, the documentaries examined the premature deaths of some of their stars and tried to decide whether the show was “cursed” or not.

Our Take: We knew that the producers of The Price Of Glee were going to have to really stretch to connect the deaths of Salling and Rivera to Glee aside the fact that the the two of them and Monteith were all in the cast, all young, and now are all gone. Of the three, Monteith’s death was the only one that could have been linked to the pressures that came with being on such a massive, immediate worldwide hit.

The entertainment reporters, crew members, and unaffiliated-with-the-show psychologist the producers interviewed try to link Salling’s and Rivera’s deaths back to the dark side of their fame, but that linkage is more than suspicious.

It’s why we did appreciate that almost 2/3 of the docuseries was related to Monteith, even if the crew members that are interviewed seem to have no problem throwing Michele under the bus when it comes to explaining a lot of the rivalries on set as well as her undue influence on Monteith. She’s also more than implicated as the reason that the show went right back to work after Monteith’s death instead of taking a hiatus or, even better, ending altogether. We’re not the biggest fans of Michele, either, but we felt that she got shivved from the beginning of part one two the end of part two, in a way that felt more gossipy than informative.

We also appreciated that, as much as the producers tried to steer interviewees towards the idea that Glee is cursed, no one was really buying into it. The darkness around the show was more of a byproduct of Murphy’s desire to have the series outdo itself every season, combined with the off-season tours and 16-hour shooting and rehearsal days that basically didn’t give the cast any time off, also combined with the unyielding pressure that came with sudden fame. Many of the interviewees just chalked up the deaths — and weirdly enough, the abusive relationship between late-in-the-run stars Melissa Benoist and Blake Jenner — to more coincidence than anything else.

Murphy doesn’t get away scot-free, though, as he’s the main culprit behind the young stars being under such enormous strain. But no one seems to call him on the carpet for going to Michele to make the ultimate decision on coming back after Monteith’s death, given that he likely knew what she would say. Perhaps it’s the fact that he’s an extremely powerful producer and the people being interviewed wanted to keep working, but these interviewees definitely didn’t make as strong a linkage with Murphy as they did with Michele.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: At the end of the first episode, Kirkpatrick talks about something Monteith told him the last time they saw each other, something that he’s reluctant to voice in public, then we cut to black.

Sleeper Star: George Rivera was the most authentic interviewee, and not just because he’s Naya Rivera’s father. He was genuinely happy for his daughter’s success, and knew that, despite the stress and the fact that she got typecast, being on Glee was ultimately good for her.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re not sure why, but whoever was the set designer for the b-roll decided to show news footage and other footage from on-set on old-fashioned tube TVs, maybe as a way to foment nostalgia. But it’s not like Glee started in 1999; it started in 2009, well within the era when most people owned high-def flat screen TVs. Heck, even we owned one by then.

Our Call: STREAM IT. If you go into The Price Of Glee with the right mindset, you’ll get some good information about just how much pressure the stars and crew of Glee were under. You have to basically ignore the producers’ attempts to link two of the stars’ deaths directly to the show itself, and definitely ignore their attempts to get any of the interviewees to call the show cursed.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.