Disney needed very few words to bring Glee back. On Wednesday, October 21, Disney+ and Hulu, its streaming services, announced a series order for a revival of the musical drama that ran on the American network Fox from 2009 to 2015. The announcement named no cast, no producers, and no premiere date. It carried the show’s L-for-loser logo and a short line on Glee’s Instagram account: “It’s official. Glee is returning.”

The studio behind the new series is 20th Television, which also produced the original. Co-creator Ryan Murphy, who developed Glee with Brad Falchuk and Ian Brennan, had been signaling the move for months. In July he said the show had “come back around,” with a new generation of young viewers discovering it. By September he had written a script and said he had contacted about 10 original cast members.

Full disclosure from this corner: I got hooked on Glee, and its songs have been my life’s anthem for years. News that it is coming back hit close to home.

A Series Order, and Very Little Else

Everything beyond the order is unconfirmed. Disney has not said when filming starts or when the show will premiere. It has not said whether the series continues the original characters’ stories or starts over with new ones. Murphy has spoken of original cast members returning, which points toward a revival.

One name is attached so far. Reports say Lea Michele is close to signing to play Rachel Berry again, the driven glee club star she played across all six seasons. Those reports are not a studio confirmation.

Chris Colfer, who played Kurt Hummel, has said he knows nothing about the revival yet. He has also said that making the show again would be hard without Naya Rivera, who played Santana Lopez. He would consider returning if given more information, he said, adding that fans would come after him with “pitchforks and jazz hands” if he refused. Jenna Ushkowitz and Kevin McHale, who played Tina Cohen-Chang and Artie Abrams, liked the announcement post on Instagram, a small signal that both may be open to returning. The revival arrives after the original cast lost three members, Rivera among them.

Why Filipino Gleeks Have a Stake

Gleeks, as the show’s devoted fans call themselves, have a long Pinoy history with the series, which aired locally on ETC and Jack TV. In 2011, Philippine entertainment coverage argued that Glee had built the strongest Filipino connection of any American TV comedy of its time. The evidence included a scene played in front of a Jollibee, a glimpse of Chowking, a prime role for Darren Criss, and a recurring part for Jake Zyrus, then billed as Charice.

Zyrus, the Filipino singer who performed as Charice Pempengco at the time, played Sunshine Corazon, a foreign exchange student who joined the glee club. In 2013, Jessica Sanchez, the Filipino-American singer who finished second on the eleventh season of American Idol and whose mother is from Bataan, joined as Frida Romero, lead singer of a rival glee club. She was the second Filipino artist to guest on the show after Zyrus.

Criss played Blaine Anderson, the lead singer of the Dalton Academy Warblers, a rival school’s glee club. His mother, Cerina Bru, was born in Cebu. When he won a Golden Globe in 2019, he called himself the son of a “firecracker Filipina woman from Cebu.” Earlier that year he wore a Pintados-inspired barong by Filipino designer Francis Libiran at his wedding reception, a nod to those Cebu roots. His Filipino identity has also drawn its own online debate, which we looked at in Who Gets to Be Filipino Enough? No announcement has linked Criss to the new series.

What We Don’t Know Yet

The premiere date, the filming schedule, the final cast, and whether the story follows the original characters as adults or introduces a new generation are all open. So is when Philippine viewers will be able to watch it. Murphy’s stated reason for returning is that viewers now in their 20s grew up on the show. Filipino viewers who first found it on ETC and Jack TV are among them, and the Filipino names tied to its history are among the most recognizable in its cast list. I count myself among those viewers and will be watching for the first cast announcement.