Earlier this month we learned that Glee star Chord Overstreet is being reduced from series regular to a guest starring role on the upcoming 3rd season of the show. Today we learn from Glee creator Ryan Murphy, by way of The Hollywood Reporter, that 3 of the show’s main characters will be graduating at the end of season 3 … thereby leaving the show forever. Lea Michele, Chris Colfer and Corey Monteith, who played sophomores on Glee when the show debuted 2 years ago, will play high school seniors in season 3 … hence, they will then graduate off the show.

Glee regulars Lea Michele, Cory Monteith and Chris Colfer will not be back for the fourth season of the Fox musical hit. In an exclusive interview with The Hollywood Reporter, series co-creator Ryan Murphy said that the three regulars will be among the characters who graduate at the end of the fall’s upcoming third season. Colfer, Michele and Monteith are not going to be back at all for Season 4. Murphy tells THR: “You can keep them on the show for six years and people will criticize you for not being realistic, or you can be really true to life and say when they started the show they were very clearly sophomores and they should graduate at the end of their senior year.” Murphy added that planning for the future beyond high school will be a heavy theme during Season 3, noting that “more characters are leaving than are staying” when graduation time comes at the season’s end. “We’ve never done anything by the book,” he said, adding that who’s graduating and who’s staying will be revealed in the Sept. 20 season premiere. “We made that decision and I involved Chris and Lea and they thought that was a good idea. They both trust the writing and trust me and felt that it would be great to have an open and closed experience for them to go out while they were on top” … “We already made the decision before the new writers came in, but everybody likes where we’re taking it and what we’re writing toward,” Murphy said, noting that while he loved the “relationship roulette” from Season 2, the upcoming run would find everyone’s love lives more stable. “I’m much more interested in Lea’s character — not so much on her relationship with Finn, but more on what her dreams are beyond high school and how she plans on getting them,” he added. “That’s what my senior year was about.” Murphy acknowledged that while he hasn’t discussed graduation plans with Monteith yet, he presumes he’s aware that Finn will be among those graduating. “He knows he was a sophomore when the show started.”

While some folks are freaking out about this news I am all … um, HELLO … how did we not see this coming? The show is about high school characters … high school kids graduate. There have been all kinds of rumors going around that Murphy has a plan in place to have Lea Michele come back to the show in some capacity but I doubt it. My guess is that they will scour the Earth for suitable replacement characters and that Glee will be a show where the cast gets replaced as needed. Skins in the UK replaces their entire cast every other year and I actually love that they do that. We still have an entire year to enjoy these 3 characters so there is no need for any rabid Gleeks to go jumping off buildings or anything. I find it interesting/dickish that Cory Monteith had to learn about the fate of his job from this THR interview and not from Ryan Murphy himself. At any rate … there you have … heads will roll at the end of Glee Season 3 … what do YOU think about that?

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