wowbright reblogged your post and added:
Wow I was just lamenting to my spouse this...
Unfortunately, I do not have easy access to any of those old interviews -- it would involve digging into TDB archives or through YouTube, but I wouldn’t even know where to start. Does anyone know? @gleekto?
Interesting thoughts about Ryan Murphy! Please don’t mind me while I think out loud for a moment. This isn’t an argument for or against what you said, just some rambling of my own. Of course, while I’ll never claim to understand anyone fully other than myself (and even that’s questionable at times) I always theorized a few things happen over the course of Glee --
1. that he had American Horror Story that he became reoccupied with, and that he’s always someone who’s looking forward to the new ‘thing’ he can create, and less back on the stuff he’s already accomplished. I was always of mind that he was kind of over it after season 2.
2. the ideas he had for the show were very different from the entire fandom (not just Klaine -- I remember the Brittana fans being much louder at him) This was all in the beginning throws of social media -- and the people on the show crossed over the line a bit much with fandom, which makes me think that it’s better in most cases when there’s separation of artist and audience. I remember the night that he was on Twitter -- and deleted everything after he had a nasty run in with fans over the episode Naked. I feel like that’s the moment when he recoiled firmly away from being as open about it as he was.
At the same time, out of the three creators, I always felt like Murphy was the biggest champion for Klaine, and perhaps the kindest to us in a lot of ways. Ian Brennan -- who wrote much of Sue, and a lot of the parody stuff on the show, often seemed to write the stinging insults flung at people (most notably, Santana’s mega rant at Kurt in season 6). And Brad Falchuk always seemed bitter more people didn’t like Will or Finchel (which is interesting when I learned listening to Kevin and Jenna’s podcast that Brad self-identified as Will)
Murphy also didn’t back down when Chris and Darren were both a little... eh, maybe teen marriage isn’t the best story line (and even I don’t think they were wrong on that one) but Murphy seemed to be pretty firm on writing what essentially was a fairy tale for LGBT+ folks.
It does make me wonder, though, what was going on in that writers room during season 3-5 -- because even if I enjoyed a lot of it, the show was all over the place, and I do wonder if Murphy was kind of letting it meander because he was on to other things.