Ever since Carrie Underwood zombied her way through The Sound Of Music, the internet masses have been looking forward to NBC’s second take on a live, televised musical. How terrible would it be? How tacky and tasteless and tweet-ready? We got word the 2014 selection would be Peter Pan, and readers: we had reason to hope. Because the musical — not the novel, which is strange and sad and gorgeous and unimpeachable, but this Mary-Martin-on-wires song-and-dance — is disaster-ready. Everything about it is, to use the internet’s favorite word, “problematic.”
There’s cross-dressing and gender confusion. Wendy is adopted by children for the purpose of being their “mother,” even though some of the boys in question are actually her brothers, and one of the boys is a guy who she like-likes but who is too immature to understand what her feelings are. Later, she is kidnapped by grown-up pirates who also want her to be their mother. The Lost Boys are played by frat-aged men. The song “Ugg-a-Wugg,” performed by Peter, Tiger Lily and the Native Americans, is a hot mess of racial stereotypes that only Dan Snyder could condone. Tinkerbell is a CGI lightning bug, Nana is a real dog; both casting choices, such as they are, qualify as accident-prone at the very least. And of course, the characters must fly. These NBC-sponsored flight plans, orchestrated by wires and not pixie dust, are primed to go awry. This was going to be the best hate-watch of the year.
So much to go wrong! So much fodder for our snark!
Well, so much for all that.
Peter Pan Live! was neither an atrocity nor a sweeping success. It was competent. Solid where many expected it to be weak (Allison Williams: wavering accent, unwavering enthusiasm), flat where one had hoped for vibrancy (Christopher Walken, his body on set, his brain on some distant planet), hilarious in presumably unintended ways (Lost Boys who look like the Newsies, Christian Borle’s biceps). We were treated to the impeccable voice of Kelli O’Hara — the Audra McDonald of this production — and a Neverland constructed of what appeared to be truffula trees.
The biggest disappointment of the evening was that it just wasn’t disappointing enough. This wasn’t the kind of thing you could hate-watch. This was a meh-watch.
But what difference does it make, if the whole shindig wound up in that Goldilocks sweet spot of not too good, not too bad?
For starters, a mediocre show pulls in a mediocre crowd. Ratings were down 51 percent from The Sound of Music. NBC claims to still be thinking happy thoughts — 9.1 million people watched, down from 18.9 million but not so shabby in today’s TV land — but it’s hard to imagine they’re thrilled about the drop.
But more importantly for the rest of us: this NBC musical thing has, oddly enough, already become something of a holiday season tradition. Even the people who are focusing more on the second screen than the first still want to be a part of it. Everyone just wants that shared experience, the rarer-than-ever feeling of community in our super-fractured pop cultural landscape. Even though the crowd is technically split in two — those who tune in for self-aware mockery and those who watch in genuine rapture — we’re all still watching the same thing. (Besides, even the stars know half the audience is only watching to make fun.) This wasn’t about want to mocking Marnie from Girls. This was about mocking her together. It’s actually kind of sweet! For us, I mean. Not her.
Don’t worry, this is not to say there was nothing to mock about Peter Pan Live! Heaven/Neverland forbid! A handful of things were really, truly bad. The crocodile — a symbol of time, enemy of us all — was, I assume, inspired by the work of Lisa Frank. The Darlings’s maid was inexplicably stashed away in Harry Potter’s under-the-staircase closet. (Next time, on Serial…) For the first 20 minutes, the camera wouldn’t stop diving and swooping, as if it were too nervous to sit still. But all in all, we were given some facsimile of the show that adults remember just well enough from childhood to love and just badly enough to have forgotten everything troubling and bizarre about it.
But most attempts at trashing this three-hour show (three hours on a school night! Who is the intended audience for this extravaganza, again?) didn’t land. Most Twitterers’s complaints were really scraping the bottom of the snide barrel. A lot of people, I noticed, mocked how visible the wires were. You didn’t think they’d actually fly, did you?
People whined more about plot points than performances. At the risk of stating the obvious, all old musicals are ridiculous and weird and completely fall apart under close inspection. There is no “updating” Peter Pan in any meaningful way; the show is always going to feel old, because it is. You can edit the “Ugg-a-Wugg” lyrics all you want, but the antiquated gender roles are what they are. What, to our modern gaze, is homoerotic vibe of the Lost Boys sharing a bathtub, well, that’s not going anywhere, either. That when Peter returns to London, having completely lost track of time in that childish way of his, and discovers Wendy is an adult, he breezily passes her over and snags her young daughter instead? That is upsetting and fraught and heartbreaking and also the entire point of the whole freaking story. Think too hard about the plot of any old-timey musical and you won’t like what you find. And we know that, right? We’re adults. We know the point of a show like this isn’t whether or not it “makes sense.”
Let’s all be grateful for what we got. It could’ve been worse! Here’s to a passable night of entertainment when there wasn’t anything else on TV, anyway, and to the best Vine of the week:
https://twitter.com/Vlahopg2/status/540867596061392896