LOS ANGELES: Television musical series Glee will address the death of star Cory Monteith in the upcoming season, writing his character out of the show and touching on Monteith’s real-life drug use, said US TV network Fox earlier this week.
Monteith, who played the high school jock-turned-show-choir-member Finn Hudson, died last month at the age of 31 in Vancouver, from an accidental overdose of heroin and alcohol.
The British Columbia Coroners Service had said in a press release that post-mortem testing on the star shows that he died of “mixed-drug toxicity involving heroin and alcohol.” It said Monteith’s death was unlikely to have been intentional.
The actor’s death has forced Fox to push back the show’s fifth season premiere in September by one week as its writers re-write episodes without Monteith’s character.
“(The) third episode will deal with the Finn Hudson character being written out of the show,” Kevin Reilly, chairman of entertainment at Fox, told reporters at a Television Critics Association meeting.
“I can’t speak about it yet because it’s still being written. That episode will deal directly with the incidents involved in Cory’s passing and the drug abuse in particular,” Reilly said.
Monteith, who had an off-screen relationship with fellow Glee star Lea Michele, had struggled with substance abuse in the past and went to rehab in April, this year.
Reilly also said the Glee cast will record public service announcements about drug abuse that will air during the episode focused on Monteith.
The fifth season of Glee will begin on September 26 and could be one of the show’s last, Reilly said.
“I would not anticipate it goes beyond two more seasons,” he said.
Monteith began his career in a number of small roles leading up to a recurring part between 2006 and 2007 in the ABC Family science-fiction drama Kyle XY and another role around the same time on the MTV series Kaya. But Glee, a show set in the small town of Lima, Ohio, was Monteith’s breakthrough.
Published in The Express Tribune, August 5th, 2013.
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