Beyond being an outrageous cultural touchstone of the 2010s, Glee was the kind of show that generated no end of offscreen controversy, including fights between the show’s stars and a bunch of rumored exits. (So much so that Ryan Murphy once told the Hollywood Reporter, “To this day, I’m devastated by everything that happened with that show.”) Even today, Lea Michelle continues to get hefty doses of shade from her costars.
It will also be remembered as a show where several cast members, including Naya Rivera and Cory Monteith, died under tragic circumstances — a subject set to be explored in a forthcoming docuseries from Discovery+, titled The Price of Glee. Yet after a new trailer for the series dropped Thursday, fans are not happy with the streaming channel, claiming that the documentary is insensitive and exploitative.
The trailer doesn’t waste time in establishing a sensationalist tone, emphasizing the glitter of fame and the many tragedies of former cast members. One unnamed interviewee states, “I don't want to say the 'C-word,' the curse word, but that's where your mind goes.”
To be clear, the three deaths of former Glee cast members were all tragic in some way. Cory Monteith, who played Finn, died due to a lethal combination of heroin and alcohol in 2013 at the age of 31. Mark Salling, who played Puck, died by suicide in 2018 after he was convicted of possession of child pornography. Naya Rivera, who played Santana, died after drowning in 2020 in a boating accident.
Yet fans expressed outrage after the trailer’s release, slamming it for being exploitative of Rivera and Monteith’s deaths. In the parlance of the internet, the trailer is getting ratio’ed to hell on Twitter, the gist of which can be summarized as follows:
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“Cory and naya deserve so much better than to have their deaths be disgustingly exploited under some tired narrative of “glee curse” let alone that being put together with a convicted pedophile,” one Twitter user wrote. “Every single person behind this is not seeing heaven.”
The Price of Glee is the latest high-profile project to elicit rabid controversy for its depiction of those who have died. In recent months, Netflix’s Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story, has been accused of being disrespectful to the Wisconsin serial killer’s victims. Of course, unlike those deaths, Rivera and Monteith’s deaths were tragic accidents with no master plan behind them. To insinuate otherwise, as The Price of Glee appears to do, is indeed an example of the exploitative and callous nature of much of the true crime industry.
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