“In May 2009, 10 young actors made their TV debut on Glee,” says text in the trailer for ID’s upcoming docuseries The Price of Glee. “By 2020, all of them would be famous, and three of them would be dead.”
The three-episode docuseries follows the dark side of the Glee musical comedy/drama, which ran on FOX from 2009-2015. Three members of the series’ original cast have since died, and the series will explore these deaths and how Glee had an impact on their lives, and maybe also their deaths, somehow. Seems like a stretch, though.
In July 2013, Corey Monteith, who played Finn Hudson, died at the age of 31 in a Vancouver hotel room as the result of a toxic combination of heroin and alcohol. Monteith, who was in a relationship with on-screen love interest Lea Michele at the time of his death, had discussed his history of addiction and substance abuse in the past.
In 2015, Mark Salling, who played Puck, was arrested for the possession of child pornography. A search warrant found more than 50,000 images of child pornography, downloaded between April and December 2015. He pled guilty in 2017, and was expected to serve prison time. Salling died by suicide in January 2018, a little over a month before his March 2018 sentencing date. He was 35.
Naya Rivera, who played the beloved queer character Santana Lopez, died in July 2020 by drowning, after a multi-day search. Rivera set out on a boat on Lake Piru in California lake with her then-4-year-old son. Rivera was 33 years old.
The Price of Glee, which seems like it will make a convoluted attempt to blame all of these deaths on Glee, airs on Investigation Discovery (ID) from 9 p.m. to 12 a.m. ET/PT on Jan. 16, 2023. The series will be available to stream on Discovery+.