Read This: Competing on The Glee Project sounds predictably awful

Will anything ever again capture the zeitgeist as Glee did? There have been watercooler shows before and since, but none that topped the charts, spawned multiple concert tours, and prompted a reality show spin-off. And speaking of the latter, Insider has a new oral history of The Glee Project that is just as chaotic as you’d expect for something coming from the twisted mind of Ryan Murphy.

Actually, Murphy confesses he didn’t much want to be involved until FOX’s deal with Oxygen forced his hand, and he realized he had to protect “the brand.” The competition was unique in that there was no particular criteria for winning. “It wasn’t about who’s the best singer or dancer,” says executive producer Shauna Minoprio. “It was about who Ryan Murphy was the most excited to write a character for.”

The piece paints the first season as a slapdash affair, in which contestants were housed at a “Jewish summer camp” where they weren’t allowed magazines or books and “slept in retrofitted bunk bedrooms that didn’t have AC,” according to contestant Cameron Mitchell. “It felt like half we were being detained against our will, and half ‘This is TV,’” he adds. Second season contestants got to live on a retired Real World set, but that doesn’t sound much better: “That kind of stuff isn’t made to live on, so things started falling apart,” says runner-up Ali Stroker.

The two-season series sounds like a classic, manipulative reality show environment: pressing contestants to become romantically involved with one another, open up about their sexuality for the cameras, and confess their deepest secrets (in one particularly ugly anecdote, runner-up Lindsay Pearce recalls sharing about a sexual assault which was cut for television to appear that she said “people like me because I’m pretty, which makes me feel fake”). “There were so many great elements of the show, but it was also really anxiety-inducing and there was a lot of trauma,” says contestant Abraham Lin. “Trauma bonds were made.”

It wasn’t all bad. Most of the contestants have positive things to say about the experience, and a handful of them launched successful careers from the show, like Stroker, who won a Tony Award in 2019 for the Oklahoma! revival. “When you’re in a wheelchair, people look at you. After The Glee Project, there was this shift,” she reflects. “When people looked my way, I thought, ‘Maybe they’re looking because they saw me on The Glee Project.’ It changed my confidence.” Check out the full story over on Insider.