TCA: 'Glee' Spinoff Officially Dead

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Chris Colfer, Lea Michele and Cory Monteith

Fox's buzzed-about Glee spinoff is officially dead.

"There will not be a Glee spinoff," Fox Entertainment topper Kevin Reilly told reporters Sunday at the Television Critics Association's winter press tour in Pasadena.

With Season 3 leading up to a graduation for Glee's core trio of Lea Michele, Chris Colfer and Cory Monteith, Reilly said the characters "will graduate" and that has led to an "interesting idea that I think is going to give us something cool to dig into for next season."

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Noting that Michele (Rachel) would be back for next season, Reilly told reporters after the executive session that the network would have to look at the cast's contractual issues but reaffirmed that "creatively, we'd want to see them all back" when asked if Colfer would be among the characters returning.

Asked if it's possible to have a show within a show, Reilly told reporters that he's "alluding to some version of that," and that the spring batch of the episodes would set up the plan for next season.

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Plans for the future of Glee became murky after co-creator Ryan Murphy told The Hollywood Reporter in July that the trio would not be returning for Season 4 with co-creator Brad Falchuk telling fans at Comic-Con days later that the trio "are not done with the show after this season."

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Falchuk noted that a New York-set spinoff revolving around the trio as Colfer and Michele's characters moved toward their Broadway aspirations was among the ideas being explored at the time.

“That was something we were planting as a possibility, but we didn’t get much further than that,” he said in July, noting that the seeds were planted during the Season 2 finale when the cast went to New York.

Email: Lesley.Goldberg@thr.com; Twitter: @Snoodit