Here’s the Glee portion of the Upfronts conference call with Kevin Reilly on Monday. Collider posted a transcript of the Glee related part, with Kevin Reilly’s full answers rather than excerpts like many other sites did. I thought people might be interested in seeing the questions Kevin Reilly was asked and his full answers.
Specifically in regard to Glee, are you going to keep the Thursday shows at one hour, as much as you can, to help those shows have more sustained runs, from now on?
REILLY: Yes, it’s just that some of the particulars of this year made that really hard. We will have some baseball preemption, once again. We’re going to get on a little early with it. The X-Factor and Glee will get out of the gate two weeks early, so we’ll get a run before we’ll get a couple baseball preemptions, but then we will be uninterrupted in the fall. But then, when we come back, the goal is to be uninterrupted when Glee comes back in, playing straight until the summer. More than anything, in this day and age, having preemptions and having to go off the air for a batch of repeats is one of the top challenges we have, frankly. It’s too much book-keeping for the audience. And with a young audience like Glee, that has not been a good thing for the show. So, part of our intention is to get it as original as possible.
With the two-season pick-up for Glee, are you marching towards an end? Do you see those as the final two seasons?
REILLY: I don’t want to say that we’re marching towards an end. We have two more seasons, which speaks to the confidence of the show and how important it is to us and our belief in Ryan [Murphy]. We’re going to take it two seasons at a time. But, there will be progression in the story. I think that will be the fun thing for the fans. It’s not going to be a static two seasons. We’re going to continue with graduation. When the show was really at its height, there were cross-over fans. The show has been very steady all year, and a really solid performer. The core fans were really happy with what went on there, creatively. So, we want to lock those in and keep them engaged in new things. New York was a really great addition to the show this year. So, there are going to be graduations and we’re going to be taking New York to the next step, in that adventure, and then there will be some really interesting mini-arcs, like we’ve done with our guest actors.
Do you have anybody planned already?
REILLY: No, we’re not going to announce anybody right now.
