The musical delivered the highest-rated Thursday night for any network since ABC’s premiere of “How to Get Away With Murder” a year ago, with the exception of sports programming.
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Shanice Williams and Uzo Aduba in NBC’s ‘The Wiz Live!’.
But it was nowhere near the 18.6 million who dashed through the Alps with Carrie Underwood on “Sound of Music Live!”, which kicked off NBC’s live-musical journey in 2013. The Wiz Live! averaged a 3.4 rating among adults 18-49 and 11.5 million viewers – a sizable jump from Peter Pan Live! The event also set a Nielsen Twitter record as most social live special program in the more than four years of tracking such numbers – generating more reactions than NBC’s two prior musicals combined.
279,400 people sent 1.6 million tweets about The Wiz Live! on 12/3/15 and 6.4 million people saw those Tweets a total of 128.9 million times.
Confused viewers outraged by the all-black cast of NBC’s “The Wiz Live!” can ease on down from their gripes – a handful of eagle-eyed social media users have spotted a white dancer in the mix. And for those still annoyed by the copious ad breaks, NBC Universal will be bringing the production back to Broadway for the 2016-17 season, where viewers will be able to see it live and ad-free (for $60-150). “We should think it through and figure out what the next choice should be in the progression of, ‘What do you follow The Wiz with so we can keep moving forward and not backward?'” With Mary J. Blige as a deliciously nasty Evillene (the Wicked Witch of the West), Queen Latifah as The Wiz and Common as the Gatekeeper of Oz, here renamed Bouncer, campiness threatened, to be sure.
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The Wiz Live! will have an encore presentation on NBC Saturday, December 19 at 8pm.
