Deadline reports that the first two episodes of season five of the series have already been written, and shooting was set to begin as early as next month. A number of TV series have had to deal with an actor’s death in the midst of a run before—just this past year, TNT’s Dallas reboot was forced to write the death of Larry Hagman into the show. But with scripts already written and production about to begin, Glee is facing an unenviable time crunch, making the question of how Monteith’s death will affect the show an especially pressing one.

It is, as tragic as seems, the typical response for TV series to kill off the character when an actor dies in the middle of a show’s run. When John Spencer died of a heart attack in 2005, his character, Leo McGarry, met the same fate on seventh season of The West Wing. When John Ritter died in September 2003, 8 Simple Rules took a two month hiatus before returning with an episode that began with Ritter’s character succumbing to an off-screen heart-attack. When Suddenly Susan actor David Strickland killed himself in 1999, the character died on the show, too.

The Sopranos and the Dallas reboot both turned to computer trickery to create a few final scenes with its departed actors—Nancy Marchand in The Sopranos and Hagman in Dallas—before having the characters die on the show, too.