Peter Pan Live! had the garish production value. Credit them for magical thinking - and for their steady improvements. Meanwhile, Zadan and Meron have made the NBC musical an annual tradition. There's too much good TV for the average human to love - and too much real hate for the average human to watch. Three years later, I'm not quite sure people hatewatch anymore.

It wasn't that long ago that conventional wisdom declared musicals on TV dead live musicals were deader than dead. The producing team of Craig Zadan and Neil Meron brought live musicals back to primetime with 2013's The Sound of Music Live!, which was a ratings sensation and a social media phenomenon never mind if it was also an immediate artifact of the year everyone discovered 'hatewatching.' Good or bad, Sound of Music deserves credit for existing at all. Hairspray Live! felt like a well-earned victory lap. And he checked in across our great nation with participating NBC affiliates in Houston, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Philadelphia, the only four Hairspray viewing parties in the country without wine. And he grooved, in realtime, with the official Hairspray Live! social squad.

In the breaks between the show and the commercials designed to look like the show and the Oreo commercial inside the show itself, Criss announced those impressive-sounding statistics. 'Three thousand lightbulbs,' said Darren Criss, '50 thousand feet of audio cable, 58 cameras, over 600 members of the cast and crew!' Hairspray Live! was a massive production it didn't miss a chance to remind you.

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