GLEEks of the Week, Stage Tube, and #racheldoesstuff

This chapter focuses on the rise and digital marketing of a spate of musical series between 2009 and 2019. It explores the specific methods used to address audiences of Fox’s Glee, NBC’s Smash, ABC’s Galavant, and The CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and how the shows’ industry-driven online footprints project both the television industry’s embrace of Web 2.0 techniques and varying methods of hailing fans of the Broadway musical. In various ways, these series blend techniques of Broadway and television fandoms and parlay theatrical language and stars into marketing tools, while acknowledging the contemporary power of online stardom in the cultivation of contemporary media texts. Whether through network websites, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, or via interactive gif-creators and contests, these four musical series hung their hopes on the promise of fan interactivity.

The Hills Are Alive with Live-ness (or Not)

Struggling broadcast networks sought to gain big ratings from a now fragmented, ever-fickle, and platform-ambivalent viewing audience by attempting to use a bit of nostalgia and celebration of liveness to temporally woo back audiences hungry for multi-platform viewing and time-shifting. NBC and Fox sought to resuscitate the live television musical with new productions of iconic shows like The Sound of Music, Peter Pan, The Wiz, Grease, and Hairspray. The years 2013 through 2018 looked like a crash course in designing these millennial musical live events, as the two networks repeatedly shifted their live musical presentation. Clear negotiations of liveness, viewership, and shooting/staging style emerged through the specials’ contested relationships with theatre itself. Through an exploration of the networks’ perception of the millennial cachet of Broadway and shifting choices in performance style and digital promotion, this chapter explores the rise and plateau of the early twenty-first century’s revival of televised live musicals.

Sequins and Songs on the Small Screen

By the late sixties, television was America’s medium and, just as it had with stage and film musicals in the decades prior, it embraced the increasingly legitimized musical style of Vegas. Whether through Mitzi Gaynor’s string of television specials; the repackaging of Sonny and Cher’s Vegas shtick, glitz, and musical tributes; or The Carol Burnett Show’s Bob Mackie–clad musical extravaganzas, Vegas/Broadway hybrids filled the small screen. This fusion of old-school and, to a lesser degree, contemporary musicals with the popularized pizzazz and glamour of Vegas brought the television musical comfortably in line with the cheeky sexiness of 1970s network programming. Highlighting the ongoing symbiosis among various musical platforms, this chapter explores the rise of a hybridized Broadway-Vegas style on television, or what the author terms “BroadVegas,” in the context of changing generic norms across stages and screens, heightened inter-network competition and branding, and emergent visual, generic, and promotional styles.

Small-Screen Singalongs

As the television industry struggled to establish its identity in the late 1940s, it looked across town to Broadway and Tin Pan Alley and embraced the deep-rooted, highly lucrative, popular musical and its music as sources of inspiration. It turned to the familiar sounds of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Leonard Bernstein—music which fueled Broadway ticket sales and the recording industry. Focusing specifically on commercial television’s first decade, 1944–1955, this chapter explores how network programming sought to absorb both the sweeping popularity and cultural legitimacy of the musical genre and Broadway stage in pursuit of much-needed viewers and a more established cultural image or cachet. Further, it explores how visuals were transported from Broadway houses to small screens and how the first glimpses of Broadway on television would emerge as the medium set the stage for decades of small-screen singalongs.

Quality and Class or Malls and Music Video

With network musical castoffs like Fame and The Muppet Show hitting it big in syndication and viewers defecting to public TV, the eighties proved challenging for ABC, CBS, and NBC. Simultaneously, viewers lucky enough to live in early-served cable markets could circumvent the networks altogether. Seeing the writing on the wall, the networks jumped into the cable arena with a string of niche performing arts channels, with CBS Cable, Alpha Repertory Theatre Service (ARTS), and The Entertainment Channel (TEC) providing viewers a new cache of musical programming. The resultant interplay between television’s heavy hitters, video distributors, and Broadway royalty like the Nederlanders highlights this as a time of high stakes for various forms of musical entertainment. That said, it was MTV and its embrace of teens and the music video tie-ins of popular dance films like Footloose and Flashdance that won the battle for the cable-based musical market.

Conclusion

This final entry draws together some larger conclusions from the previous seven chapters, specifically addressing the complexity of the relationship between the various performance platforms and locales discussed in the book. As well, it poses some suggestions for future historical work regarding the relationship between television and the musical and looks ahead at the ever-rising level of convergence and audience participation possible in an increasingly networked world. It nods to an emergent trend in showing recordings of Broadway shows in movie theatres, the launch of Broadway HD, and the role the Internet plays in distributing licensed, bootlegged, and fan-created musical texts. It notes that the book is in no way comprehensive but seeks to illuminate the string of moving parts involved in the musical’s forays into television and ultimately looks forward at what might still be coming down the pike.

Primetime Goes Hammerstein

This chapter explores shifts in television’s industrial landscape, examining how stylistic, technical, and viewer-based shifts opened up new spaces that encouraged the production of one-off musical episodes in otherwise straight fictional television series. A look across performance platforms illustrates how simultaneous changes that occurred in story types and methods of storytelling in stage and screen musicals of the1990s and the first decade of the 2000s dovetailed with emergent norms within the struggling post-network television landscape. Increasingly porous acting pools, the cross-platform entrenchment of self-aware stories and narrative styles, and a drive toward niche audiences helped create a late-millennium perfect storm that ushered in a new formally complex marriage of the musical and television. This chapter concludes with a close analysis of Grey’s Anatomy’s season seven musical episode, “The Song Beneath the Song,” highlighting its embodiment of television’s embrace of emergent cross-platform norms of musical performance, post-network narrative style, and contemporary target marketing.

“You Know, Carol, Comedy Variety’s a Man’s Game”

By the mid-sixties, dames of the Broadway and film musical were taking their much-deserved bows as variety’s small-screen headliners, but why? Changes were surely occurring everywhere: the small screen, the Broadway stage, the form of the musical book, and in the American culture at large. This chapter contextualizes the rise of crossover stars like Carol Burnett, Carol Channing, Pearl Bailey, Barbra Streisand, Liza Minnelli, and Leslie Uggams, and positions their ascent within larger theatrical, televisual, and cultural contexts. It asks how they and their television appearances differ from the less prominent women of the earlier television era and how changes occurring in Shubert Alley and Hollywood helped to open up this space for the dames of Broadway. Ultimately this chapter addresses why and how television welcomed these divas and how this new embrace spoke to earlier and emergent norms of American popular culture, the musical, and a maturing television industry.

Introduction

Although a twenty-first-century bump in high-profile musical television programming like Glee and The Sound of Music Live! brought television’s relationship to the musical back into the popular cultural consciousness, the Hollywood and Broadway musical had always been part of the American television landscape. This chapter sets up this relationship and creates a road map for the seven-chapter exploration of the small screen’s romance with a foundational American art form. It further contextualizes the work within a broader view of popular music, early forms of musical platform convergence (e.g. Broadway with sheet music sales, radio, and motion pictures), existing scholarship, and the challenges of conducting such a historical study when copies of the primary focus of the research—the programming itself—no longer exist or never existed in re-viewable form.