According to Variety, “The Wiz Live!” topped NBC’s “Peter Pan” musical.
Variety writes:
Two years after NBC stunned the industry with boffo ratings for its live presentation of “The Sound of Music,” the network was back at it Thursday night with “The Wiz Live,” which drew impressive numbers of its own. 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.
Despite facing a highly rated NFL game on CBS, last night’s live musical, whose all-star cast included Queen Latifah, Mary J. Blige and David Alan Grier, averaged a 3.4 rating/11 share in adults 18-49 and about 11.5 million viewers overall from 8 to 10:45 p.m., according to preliminary Nielsen estimates. The only NBC entertainment series to fare better this fall is “The Voice,” whose season premiere averaged a 3.5/11 in 18-49 and 12.37 million.
The 3.4 demo rating is 42% above that earned by last year’s live musical presentation of “Peter Pan” (2.4/7 in 18-49, 9.21 million viewers overall). It wasn’t quite up to the level of “Sound of Music,” which averaged a 4.6/13 in the demo and 18.32 million viewers.
Awesome news!!!! I absolutely loved it!!!! I saw a hashtag today on social media along the lines of #RepresentationMatters — I agree and they nailed it!!!!
Good sh-t. I’m going to watch it again on demand.
It’s on demand?! I need to watch it again because I missed the first hour.
I loved it.
It was flawless!
I missed it and everybody keeps saying how good it was I have to watch it.
I’m happy for them. I enjoyed every second.
It was awesome and I hope I can get it on DVD.
I loved it! Squeeing with happiness that it pulled in big numbers.
Well damn! #BlackExcellence
Nice.
Y’all don’t laugh at a brother but I still haven’t seen the one with Mike and Diana in it. But I caught most of this last night and I thought it was cool.
There were so many reasons to love this but number one for me is they were rocking so much natural hair. When is the last time black children had these kind of positive images about black people? I’m going to buy this DVD multiple times and pass it out as Christmas gifts and stocking stuffers.