From left, Amber Riley, Jenna Ushkowitz, Chris Colfer, Diana Agron, Kevin McHale, Mark Salling, Lea Michele and Cory Monteith. (Getty)
The next and last season for the high-school-based musical TV series Glee will be set in New York City. The recent grads will pack their bags and leave Lima, Ohio, and end up in the Big Apple.
On Monday, Fox chairman Kevin Reilly confirmed the move.
Speaking of the show’s sixth and final season, Reilly said:
Some are going to be graduating and moving; creatively, it would be ridiculous that everybody moves to New York. There will be some that will graduate and move on and they’ll arc back in when we do special episodes.
Currently the show has three characters living in New York. Lea Michele’s character, Rachel, and her bestie Kurt Hummel, played by Chris Colfer, first came to New York at the start of Season 4.
Lea Michele’s Rachel and Chris Colfer’s Kurt for Glee Season 4 in New York City on August 12, 2012 pic.twitter.com/nDggJ8u3
— Gleepedia | LOUDER (@Gleepedia) August 14, 2012
Santana, played by Naya Rivera, came to join them later on that same season.
Santana. #Glee pic.twitter.com/7s0m7krn
— Gleek! (@GleekMagical) February 8, 2013
The Fox series, which is on hiatus till February, is still grappling with the tragic death of Corey Monteith, who played Finn Hudson on the show. The show may have not ended in New York if Monteith were still alive.
In fact, the show’s creator, Ryan Murphy, said there were plans for Rachel to move back to Ohio to be with Finn.
In a eulogy for Monteith that Murphy wrote for Entertainment Weekly, he confessed that he had already planned the ending to the beloved series, which of course, included the love story of central characters Monteith and Lea Michele:
At the end of season six, Lea’s Rachel was going to have become a big Broadway star, the role she was born to play. Finn was going to have become a teacher, settled down happily in Ohio, at peace with his choice and no longer feeling like a Lima loser. The very last line of dialogue was to be this: Rachel comes back to Ohio, fulfilled and yet not, and walks into Finn’s glee club. ‘What are you doing here?’ he would ask. ‘I’m home,’ she would reply. Fade out. The end.
Corey Monteith and Ryan Murphy (Getty)