• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, December 1, 2015

At the rate these live musicals on NBC are going, expect an audience in the mid-4 millions for “The Wiz” on Thursday night.

I know -- that’s a snarky thing to say that probably has no basis in actual fact when it comes to projecting TV ratings based on past experience. I’m just pointing out that last December’s “Peter Pan Live!” on NBC drew half the audience of the first live musical on NBC a year before that -- “The Sound of Music Live!” in December 2013. 

For the record, “The Sound of Music Live!” starring Carrie Underwood was a smash with 18.6 million total viewers and a 4.6 rating in the demo (18-49). A year later, “Peter Pan Live!” starring Allison Williams in the title role drew 9.2 million with a 2.3 in the demo. 

While these figures are half of what “The Sound of Music” drew in 2013, an audience of 9.2 million and a 2.3 rating in 18-49 viewers still represents a good night in broadcast television these days.

However, if this trend were to continue, “The Wiz Live!” will draw 4.6 million viewers and something like a 1.1 in the demo. But this isn’t how ratings are projected, is it?

Surely, other factors are at work here with these musicals. For one thing, few would disagree that “The Sound of Music” is more beloved and well-remembered than “Peter Pan.” That had to be a big reason “The Sound of Music” did better than “Peter Pan.” Everybody and their grandmother knows the words to every song in “The Sound of Music.” By comparison, almost no one can name or sing a song from “Peter Pan.”

In addition, Carrie Underwood -- the “American Idol” winner who became one of the nation’s biggest music stars (and even performs the opening song for “Sunday Night Football” on NBC) -- is a much bigger mass-appeal draw than Allison Williams, who’s best known as Brian Williams’ daughter and one of the stars on HBO’s “Girls,” whose audience is relatively miniscule (although journalists write about it constantly).

So where does this leave “The Wiz”? That’s a good question. Certainly, NBC’s publicity campaign is positioning this 1970s all-African-American adaptation of “The Wizard of Oz” as a musical on par with “The Sound of Music” and “Peter Pan” in the pantheon of beloved musicals. One would assume that if the network thought otherwise, it wouldn’t have undertaken this production.

Personally, I’m not so sure this “Wiz” has legs, so to speak, but I am by no means representative of the audience for musical theater -- particularly those mounted for television. As I freely admitted in a blog post published a year ago on the morning after “Peter Pan,” there was no way I was going to sit through a three-hour, live musical on TV -- much less one that I had almost no familiarity with.

These days, when it comes to TV, I don’t sit through three hours of anything. And I don’t know anyone else who does either, except for football games and those interminable baseball playoffs.

On the other hand, many people love a musical, whether it’s a musical they know well or one that they would like to know better. It’s also true that where “The Wiz” is concerned, many people do know the “Ease on Down the Road” song. And many people are aware that Michael Jackson played the Scarecrow in the 1978 movie. Diana Ross played the girl Dorothy, although Ross was then 34 years-old.

The cast of the new “Wiz” on NBC includes Shanice Williams as Dorothy, Queen Latifah as the wizard, David Alan Grier as the Cowardly Lion, and rapper Ne-Yo as the Tin Man. When I recently saw an NBC press release with the headline “Reddi-wip joins NBC’s ‘The Wiz Live’,” I momentarily thought a rapper named Reddi-wip had joined the cast. Instead, it was the “whipped cream in a can” company, which had agreed to participate in an effort to promote music education.

“The Wiz Live!” is the latest example of network television’s efforts to produce “live” events that resist deferred viewing such as DVR-recording and streaming. Whether these experiments -- which include the live Neil Patrick Harris show “Best Time Ever” that aired earlier this fall on NBC -- are achieving this goal remains uncertain.

I’ll say this in support of NBC’s efforts to mount a live musical every December: With this third go-round, this has officially become a holiday-time tradition that one hopes will continue for years to come covering all sorts of musicals, regardless of whether the ratings go up or down.

“The Wiz Live!” airs Thursday night (Dec. 3) from 8 to 11 Eastern on NBC.