See all the musical numbers from The Wiz Live!

Better news for NBC was that it dominated the night among women 18-49 viewers – getting a 14 share versus a 8 share that CBS’s “Thursday Night Football” posted for the demo. This video was licensed from Grab Networks.

279,400 people sent 1.6 million tweets about The Wiz Live! on 12/3/15 and 6.4 million people saw those Tweets a total of 128.9 million times. The nearly three-hour television production attracted 11.5 million viewers, according to preliminary Nielsen figures.”The Wiz” eased on down the road to excellent ratings.The Sound of Music Live! And for those still annoyed by the copious ad breaks, NBC Universal will be bringing the production back to Broadway for the 2016-17 season, where viewers will be able to see it live and ad-free (for $60-150).

“‘The Wiz’ is by far NBC’s most sophisticated live musical broadcast yet; it’s also one that felt, movingly, of its time”, wrote Daniel D’Addario, Time’s TV critic. For that and more of the best looks from The Wiz, click on the slideshow below.

The Wiz Live!’s starry cast included Stephanie Mills as Aunt Em, Queen Latifah as the Wiz, Mary J. Blige as Evillene, Ne-Yo as the Tinman, Elijah Kelly as the Scarecrow, David Alan Grier as the Cowardly Lion, Uzo Aduba as Glinda, Amber Riley as Addaperle, Common as the Gatekeeper and newcomer Shanice Williams as Dorothy. “Everyone served as a good reminder that, after the aerial dance numbers of Peter Pan Live! and the elaborate sets of The Sound of Music Live!, no flashy TV musical gimmicks can match the power of raw talent”.

In The Wiz Live! Since most shows are happy if they do a 1.7 rating or so rating and ecstatic if they do more than a 2.0 rating, a 4.4 is achieving quite above and beyond the status quo.

And unlike previous years, by and large “The Wiz” viewers weren’t hate-watching.