In case you missed it, NBC recently broadcast a live staging of The Sound of Music, starring Carrie Underwood as Maria.
It was, largely, not very well received. I didn’t watch the live event, myself—but it was hard to miss the deluge of snark that suddenly filled my Twitter stream. But that doesn’t matter. NBC will probably do it again.
If everyone hated The Sound of Music so much, why would NBC do this again?
Two words: business model. Live broadcasts of musicals may be more likely to yield camp than quality, but it doesn’t matter—they’re good for business. Broadcast TV depends upon ad revenue, and ad revenue depends upon lots of viewers with their butts in the seats at the scheduled time, watching ads. Between DVRs and streaming services, this business model has steadily eroded. It’s hard—damn near impossible—to get large audiences to sit on the couch at the same time and watch a show.
But audiences still sit down for live broadcasts—sporting events like NFL games, the Olympics, awards ceremonies, and, yes, live musicals. When people live-tweet the event, all the better; it’s just more incentive for people to sit down at the scheduled time to be part of the instant online community. (See also Scandal, whose fans reliably live-tweet new episodes the moment they air.) It doesn’t matter if most of these comments are negative; the size of the audience is what matters, even if every last viewer is hate-watching.
