Few shows seem to polarize people as much as Glee does, with some considering it a guilty pleasure, others a font of awfulness, and still others (like me) a horrible vehicle to remind us that Gwyneth Paltrow desires to inflict upon us her singing. Well, get ready for another fairly polarizing moment: creator Ryan Murphy has announced that three of the show's stars, Lea Michele, Cory Monteith, and Chris Colfer, will all be "graduating" at the end of this coming season and won't be returning for the fourth season.
Any show that features high schoolers will have to deal with the inevitable graduation episodes, and there are a variety of ways to handle it. If you're largely based around a single notable character, like Buffy or Boy Meets World, you simply follow that character and his/her friends off to college after they would otherwise be graduating according to the timeline of the show. If you're more focused on the school itself, you graduate characters and bring in new actors, as I believe Friday Night Lights would occasionally do (in addition to actually flipping to another school entirely). It seems as though Murphy and his co-creators have chosen to go the latter route, which is risky but should prove to be entertaining; jettisoning some of your more popular characters and actors saves you money since you can replace them with fresh faces, but you also, well, get rid of popular characters and actors, which risks pissing off your fanbase.
The show's undergoing a fair amount of changes in the wake of adding six new writers to the staff; previously only Murphy and his co-creators Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan were responsible for all the scripts. Murphy's also planning more serialized story arcs instead of just the standalone episodes that season two featured. Is this the moment that Glee jumps the shark, or is all this change a good thing? And how will this effect the inevitable sequel to This Ain't Glee XXX?
