A Christmas Story LIVE! airs December 17th, 7pm on FOX.
Following up their live production of Grease, FOX brought an adaptation of A Christmas Story to the small screen. Rather than pulling from the 1983 movie that has since become a classic, this television event is heavily inspired by the more recent musical version on Broadway. I’m happy to report that the three-hour show was mostly a success.
Maya Rudolph and Matthew Broderick were great in their roles as the mother and narrator, respectively. But the real “breakout” performance was Jane Krakowski as the school teacher. The star child actor was pretty decent, and audiences will definitely be seeing more of him. I enjoyed seeing Ana Gasteyer take on an original Hanukkah song, although it wasn’t very good.
The broadcast also featured the first ever live commercial for a movie, promoting The Greatest Showman, which is also a musical. Unfortunately, despite being quite the feat, the sound mixing was awful. The film got lots of great press over it though.
Despite being pretty good as far as live TV musicals go, I fear A Christmas Story will be forgotten because it was shoehorned into the schedule at the end of the year. How many people actually tuned in?
TV and City 