First, as it did in the 1990s (and will likely do again in the 2030s), television has “discovered” that black people watch television and that white people will watch some television when there are black and brown bodies on the screen. Call it the Scandal/Empire effect. With the television industry scrambling to blacken/brown their landscapes for the 2015-2016 season, The Wiz largely follows this trend to help diversify NBC’s screen – a network that lags behind ABC and Fox with respect to the representation of black and brown actors in leading roles. This also marks a departure from NBC’s previous broadcasts The Sound of Music and Peter Pan, which featured largely white casts. Audra McDonald was the only major black/brown actor in The Sound of Music – and even she received criticism in some circles for being cast despite her credentials as a then-five-time Tony Award Winner. In this (re)turn to blackness, The Wiz at turns lets NBC have it both ways: it can broadcast a musical that will feature a predominantly black cast, thus jumping on the “diversity” bandwagon, while at the same time, The Wiz is one of the few Broadway texts (or at least soundtracks) that multicultural audiences embrace, without the lure of “stars” to make it attractive. The potential for a cross-section of multicultural viewers likely proved far too attractive for NBC to resist. Which brings me to my second point…

The Wiz, like NBC’s previous live musicals, is family-friendly fare. It continues to be a go-to musical for elementary and middle/junior high schools across the country (even ill-advised all-white schools have been known to tackle productions of The Wiz). I was in two productions while in junior high school (shout out to Mrs. Rowe and Mr. Nelson!). In this way, NBC is likely banking on a segment of the audience who can draw on the nostalgia of performing (or preparing to perform) The Wiz. In addition, unlike Empire, Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder, The Wiz does not delve into “adult content” that might make it touch and go for parents wanting to watch the broadcast with their children. Much like NBC’s The Voice, The Wiz presents the potential to be a cross-racial, cross-generational television-watching experience.

This version of The Wiz also has to serve two gods. First, it has to serve the ratings machine, as any television show does. But, second, and more importantly, it has to serve the more fickle Broadway god. In this way, in an attempt to make The Wiz relevant, the production team will attempt to use the success of the recent Broadway revival of Pippin as its template. Pippin, like The Wiz, is a period piece. Pippin got around that “problem” by turning the production into a Cirque de Soleil-style event. The score remains fundamentally 1970s, as does The Wiz‘s score, but this novelty worked for Pippin (it ran for almost two years, won four Tony Awards and recouped its $8.5 million investment in eight months). Presumably, the conflation of an industrial interest in black viewers/audiences and the circus theme is expected to deliver on both fronts for NBC and Broadway producers.

However, the reasons The Wiz looks good on paper also could present problems for NBC. Importantly, the Broadway and film adaptations of The Wiz are often conflated. Many/most of the stories I read on NBC’s version of The Wiz talked about the 1975 Broadway adaptation, but used imagery from the 1978 film version. While that may seem like a nit pick on its face, the two versions are different. The Broadway iteration maintains much of what we know from the 1939 film adaptation starring Judy Garland – Dorothy is still a little girl from Kansas – while it updates the language to hew closer to 1970s black cultural dialect. But most importantly in its Broadway iteration, The Wiz used a completely new score, which gave us the beloved “Ease on Down the Road.” The film adaptation “ages” Dorothy to a 24-year old kindergarten school teacher (likely because of casting Diana Ross as Dorothy) and moves her to Harlem in an attempt to make it something that “might pass for a ghetto fairy tale” as The New York Times’ Vincent Canby suggested. But the film version also plays with the score a bit, adding the Scarecrow song “You Can’t Win,” which replaces “I Was Born on the Day Before Yesterday.” In addition, because the DVD (and television syndication) functions as what Paul Grainge calls “markets of memory” (10-11), the preserved and re-circulated version of The Wiz will likely be vastly different than what NBC presents. Aside from the ways that the Broadway version (which NBC is presumably presenting) and film version are fundamentally different, this version of The Wiz will add “new material” provided by Harvey Weinstein. In this way, making this new version of The Wiz is akin to a person who has had one too many facelifts – there’s something familiar, but also fundamentally different.

Of course, the jury is still out with respect to how this new The Wiz will perform, but I predict that it will deliver the ratings NBC needs to continue its engagement with live, televised Broadway musicals (particularly because hate-watchers are gonna hate). But as the industrial infatuation with black viewers undoubtedly wanes, don’t hold your breath for NBC’s next musical to be Sophisticated Ladies, Ain’t Misbehavin’, Dreamgirls or any other black-cast musical. NBC selecting The Wiz as its next musical, I suggest, is not about its blackness per se, but about what televisual blackness means at this socio-historical moment.

Jack and Kristina Wagner, stars of General Hospital, in 2004.

Here I am, about to start writing this column, when the news arrives. Frisco Jones! Back on General Hospital! Secretly shooting as we speak! If you find this half as exciting as I do, you just may have spent the 1980s in a bedroom wallpapered with photos of GH actors and/or as a charter member of the Jack Wagner fan club.

Jack Wagner’s imminent return to General Hospital is the latest in a long string of actors reprising their roles on ABC’s sole remaining daytime soap. Over the past year, an ongoing stream of GH favorites from the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s have appeared on screen, some in short-term runs, others in long-term contract roles. That these characters were part of General Hospital’s heyday, the period from the late 1970s to the early 1990s when the program achieved high ratings and reaped major ad dollars, is reflected in the fan excitement that attends each of these returns. But the rejuvenation of General Hospital is not just about the appearance of popular actors. Since former One Life to Live executive producer Frank Valentini and head writer Ron Carlivati took over in early 2012, the program has mined its own rich history, as well as that of ABC Daytime and the soap genre more broadly, to tell stories rooted in the long on-screen lives of its characters, referencing story events from as far back in General Hospital history as the 1970s, and bringing into the diegetic world characters and events from defunct ABC soaps, as well. These returns and references have made forward-driving contributions to new and ongoing stories and have remained true to most fans’ understandings of the characters.  Most importantly, they express an unabashed love and respect for these on-screen worlds, the daytime soap genre, and viewers’ life-long commitments to these programs.

Duke Lavery (Ian Buchanan) returning to General Hospital in 2012.

Between 2009 and early 2012, things looked very dire for the U.S. daytime soap opera. In that period, four of the genre’s eight shows were canceled, including CBS’s Guiding Light, a carry-over from radio, and As the World Turns, the longest running TV soap to date. Also in this period, ABC canceled two of its three remaining soaps, All My Children and One Life to Live, in a single blow. Yet something curious has happened over the past year.  In this time, the genre has seen something of a revival both economically and culturally. The remaining four soaps seem relatively secure in their network berths, and the production company Prospect Park has put into place in recent weeks the production of both All My Children and One Life to Live for their web-based The OnLine Network. News coverage and fan buzz about soaps has been positive and hopeful of late, a 180-degree turn from just over a year ago, when despair, cynicism, and dismissiveness reigned.

We might explain the rejuvenation of this scaled-down genre in multiple ways. For one, the broadcast networks can much more viably manage the economics of one (or two, in the case of CBS) daytime soaps on their schedule than they could the multiple programs of the recent past, helping the remaining four broadcast soaps achieve a new kind of stability. In addition, the intensive investment of soap fans and our culture’s enthusiasm for new media innovations are bringing Prospect Park’s online revivals some heady buzz, even if their long-term viability remains uncertain. Such developments suggest that shifting soaps into niche-targeted slots within the broader media landscape, as opposed to expecting them to retain mass hit status amidst universal audience fragmentation, may be the key to sustaining the genre’s economic viability.

Actress Lynn Herring, who started out on General Hospital and later appeared in Days of Our Lives and As the World Turns, also returned to GH in 2012.

But soap viewers have long known that many of the problems the genre has faced were as much about the substance of the shows themselves as they were about changes in TV economics or a mismatch between the genre and contemporary women (a view Oprah Winfrey, among others, endorsed). Soaps were often victims of mismanagement, of network interference in the creative labor of writers and producers, and of some of those creative forces too readily buying into the argument that soaps no longer resonate with the needs and interests of their primarily female audience. Over the past twenty years, the genre’s basic principles, its respect for narrative history, its concern with the travails of strong women, and its ability to weave complex narratives out of a multi-dimensional, multi-generational array of characters, were too often abandoned. But in the past year, spearheaded by the remarkable final weeks of One Life to Live, viewers of some soaps have witnessed a return to such principles, buoyed by faster-paced storytelling and the paired emotional experiences of laughter and tears that had been a trademark of the ABC soaps in particular. With this resurgence of respect for the genre and its viewers, the present moment has become one of the more exciting and promising in U.S. daytime soap history.