Disney has ordered a new Glee, and the announcement was almost blank. No showrunner, no cast, no premiere window, no logline. Disney+ and Hulu said only that a revival of the Fox musical was going ahead at the same studio that made the original. Asked what else there was, Disney offered one statistic: the music from Glee still draws millions of listeners on Spotify every month.

That detail shows what Disney thinks it has bought. Not a reunion, which nobody has confirmed, but a songbook that never stopped playing. MCM’s argument is that this is the right instinct aimed at the wrong target. The original Glee was a hit machine designed for a download store that no longer runs the charts, and a revival that simply re-records famous songs will be built for a market that has gone. What will decide whether the new show works is not which faces come back to McKinley High. It is what the new glee club sings, and whether any of it lasts past its first week.

Ryan Murphy, who created the series with Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, has already said where the value sits. “For many, many people now in their 20s, they grew up on that show and it meant something to them,” he told The Hollywood Reporter in August. “The music meant something.” For that audience, the revival decides whether Glee becomes a living franchise again or stays a nostalgia playlist with a few new episodes attached.

Disney announced a brand, two platforms and one number

The trade coverage agrees on how little there is. In The Hollywood Reporter, Rick Porter wrote that the press release mentioned “no producers or cast” and that, according to his sources, creative-team deals were still being finalised. Variety’s Selome Hailu reported that “Disney shared nothing aside from the fact that the series is being produced by 20th Television and will air on Hulu and Disney+.” TVLine added that no premiere date is known and no casting is confirmed, and TheWrap noted that it is unclear how Murphy, Falchuk and Brennan would split showrunning, or whether a new showrunner will be brought in.

What exists is a script. Murphy told Entertainment Tonight in September that “Brad, Ian and I, who wrote all the first two seasons, have written something,” and that he had been in touch with “around 10 of the original cast members.” They “all had a lot of questions,” he said, “but they all were very enthusiastic about the idea.” Lea Michele told E! News: “I will follow Ryan wherever he goes.” Chris Colfer, speaking to Bustle, was more careful: “It was a really tough show to do, and it would be really hard to do it now that Naya [Rivera] is gone.” As Variety recalled, three members of the original cast have died: Cory Monteith in 2013, Mark Salling in 2018 and Naya Rivera in 2020.

And then there is the number. Deadline reported that Disney itself said the show “currently draws around 4M monthly listeners on Spotify, highlighting its current relevance.” Variety put the average at 4.1 million, and The Hollywood Reporter added that the original series streams on Hulu. When a studio has nothing else to say about a project, the statistic it chooses to volunteer is its pitch.

A hit machine built for the iTunes week

To see why that number cuts both ways, look at how the music worked the first time. TVLine recalls that Glee “regularly released singles the day after airing a new episode” and regularly topped the iTunes charts. The volume was historic. According to Billboard, the Glee Cast first reached the Hot 100 in June 2009 with its cover of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin’” at No. 4, passed Elvis Presley’s 108 entries in February 2011 and finished with 207, a record Drake overtook only in March 2020. Columbia Records, the Sony label that released the songs, said in April 2012 that Glee had sold 43 million songs and more than 12 million albums worldwide.

In 2013, Billboard’s Gary Trust published the caveat that goes with those totals: “173 of its 207 chart entries – or 84% – have spent a single week on the survey.” Only “Don’t Stop Believin’” lasted as long as seven weeks. By comparison, 82 of Presley’s 108 hits stayed seven weeks or more. Billboard later described how the cast ran up its count, with “first-week fan purchases driving their chart runs.” Glee did not produce standards. It produced souvenirs: you watched the episode, you bought the track, the chart counted it once.

That economy has gone. When Drake passed the Glee Cast’s record, Billboard noted that the song which did it earned almost all its chart points from streams. Streaming counts plays every week and rewards songs people come back to, not songs they buy once. The decline was visible even then. Billboard counted 79 Glee Cast entries in 2010 and 26 in 2012, “as its weekly releases began showing markedly lower sales sums.”

Read Disney’s figure in that light. The show ended in 2015, so those four million monthly listeners are playing recordings that are at least a decade old. That is proof of attachment, not a production plan. A new season that releases the same kind of covers would be competing with Glee’s own back catalogue, and with every other cover on the platform.

The case for familiar faces and familiar songs

The strongest objection runs like this. Covers are not a weakness of Glee; they are its premise. A show choir performs other people’s songs, and the pleasure is hearing a teenager from Lima, Ohio, take on Journey. The catalogue that still streams is made of covers, so covers are proven demand. And revivals that leaned on new faces have struggled. HBO Max cancelled its Gossip Girl reboot after two seasons, as Rolling Stone reported in January 2023, and OUT noted that its first season had set an opening-weekend record for the platform before interest faded. On this reading, Disney’s empty press release is simply patience. The alumni Murphy contacted are the product, and the songs should be the ones people already know.

There is real force in that. A Glee with none of the original faces would lose much of its pull, and Murphy’s own explanation for the revival, quoted by Deadline, was about an audience that had found the old show again: “So many young people now watch it.” The safe version of this project is a homecoming with a familiar setlist.

Disney already ran this experiment

The reply is on the same platform. Disney+ spent four seasons on High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, a show about a school staging a musical, built on a much-loved Disney brand, with a new young cast. Its final season arrived in August 2023. One of its songs, “All I Want,” was written by a cast member named Olivia Rodrigo and debuted on the Hot 100 at No. 90 in January 2020. A year later her single “Drivers License” debuted at No. 1, and Billboard’s account of her rise starts with that Disney+ series. The franchise’s most valuable musical legacy is not a cover. It is a songwriter.

Glee had its own version of that evidence and walked past it. “Loser Like Me,” an original song written for the second season, debuted at No. 6 in 2011, which Billboard ranked as the cast’s second-highest Hot 100 placement after “Don’t Stop Believin’.” The later seasons also kept bringing in new students, and TVLine lists Melissa Benoist, Alex Newell, Becca Tobin and Josie Totah among those who “would go on to great success.” The format already assumes turnover. A glee club graduates every spring.

None of this means the alumni should stay away. It defines their job. Returning faces can bring an audience back for the first week, which is exactly what the old chart model rewarded. Streaming asks for the second week, the tenth week, the song people add to a playlist without having seen the episode. That needs new voices and some songs nobody has heard before, and it needs a show that treats its music as a product rather than a souvenir.

Disney is well placed to try. It now controls the studio, the brand and both platforms the series will stream on. What it has not said is who will release the new music: the original recordings came out on Columbia, a Sony label, and the order says nothing about a soundtrack deal. That silence matters more than the missing cast list, because the soundtrack plan will show whether Disney sees the new Glee as an episode schedule or as a record release.

Confirmed so far, and what is still a guess

Confirmed: Disney+ and Hulu have placed a series order for Glee with 20th Television, according to Disney’s press release as reported by E! News, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, TVLine, Deadline and TheWrap. Murphy says he, Falchuk and Brennan have written a script, and that around ten original cast members he contacted were enthusiastic. Not confirmed: any cast member, the showrunner, a premiere date, the story or who will release the music. The chart history comes from Billboard, and the sales totals from Columbia Records.

Interpretation: the reading that Disney is buying a music franchise rests on the one figure Disney chose to share, and the claim that the download-era model cannot be repeated rests on Billboard’s record of the cast’s chart runs. Whether a revival built on covers can still thrive is a bet the show has not placed yet. The old Glee taught a generation that every song gets one week. The new one has to find a song that earns a second.

Tags: Disney+, hulu, Ryan Murphy, Glee, High School Musical: The Musical: The Series, TV reboots