“The Little Mermaid Live!,” ABC’s frequently-jittery, in the end charming live performance special, strode right into a heavy wake.

“The Little Mermaid Live!,” ABC’s frequently-jittery, in the end charming live performance special, strode right into a heavy wake.

It follows NBC’s now-shelved excursion-season way of life of stay musicals whose very attraction became their dancing on the brink of disaster, as with formidable stagings of “The Sound of Music” in 2013 and “Peter Pan” in 2014, shows whose occasional shortfalls proved the admirable ambition of the venture. (“Plain and easy: Mean humans want Jesus,” Carrie Underwood memorably tweeted the day after her overall performance as the problem known as Maria become extensively mocked for limited range.) Earlier this year, Fox’s personal attempt at a comparable ongoing assignment came to a jarring and bizarre deadlock whilst an elaborately planned live production of “Rent” became confronted by its lead breaking his foot before air, necessitating the awkward use of taped rehearsal pictures whilst airtime got here.

ABC has no such way of life, and was free to make its personal regulations for a live musical production — ones that occurred to be pleasantly consistent with the network’s other current quick. In the times before the launch of Disney Plus, a service whose personal unique content material tends closer to a less-than-witty restaging of nostalgia, two hours of ABC’s air have been given over to what ultimately turned into more consequential as a promoting of the 1989 animated traditional “The Little Mermaid” than whatever overly creative. A surprising amount of ABC’s “Little Mermaid” become dedicated to rebroadcasting regularly-lengthy scenes from the lively movie that could were hard to stage, in among stay productions of musical numbers.

That fealty to the source material isn't always a bad aspect, though! The amount of time spent with the original “Little Mermaid” became a pleasing reminder that one of the Disney lively movies that has not (but) been reinvented as a large-budget stay-action film has charms, from its painterly animation to its seafaring-pun humor, that would be close to-impossible to recreate on grand scale. The show thrived, in its live moments, whilst it embraced being proudly ersatz — its use, as an instance, of puppet critters never meant to look actual serenading Eric and Ariel in “Kiss the Girl,” or, for that matter, Shaggy’s past due-duration-boy-band crimson leather jumpsuit very kind of symbolizing what an grownup man may look like as Sebastian the crab.

The home made, quirk-heavy tone of the production carried the day so closely that at least one large star regarded out of vicinity: Heavily expected and promoted in the broadcast, Queen Latifah, as Ursula, appeared to fall in the back of the beat and to generally lack the risky abandon of her component — one that ought to be almost vibrating with menace — and of the piece. (John Stamos, introduced in for a cameo, seemed to view his component with outright why-hassle disdain; Shaggy, via contrast, may not have embodied Sebastian flawlessly, however became devoted to his bit.) And, as Ariel, Auliʻi Cravalho delivered a shifting earnestness for the duration of, one that furnished a compelling match to the animated fabric. With that as a uniting thread, the shift backward and forward between painstaking and adorable animation and lower-fi stay manufacturing aiming extra for “adorable” than “stunning” jarred a piece much less.

In all, perhaps this was an commercial on ABC for Disney Plus that redounded nicely on both — if we stipulate, inside the midst of a extremely heated second as regards Disney’s dominance of the leisure industry, that both existing to promote each other is the unchangeable country of play. ABC’s broadcast became a lovingly made reminder of “The Little Mermaid’s” greatness that cleverly didn’t are seeking to outshine its supply cloth. And the use of Disney archival materials in conjunction with a production built to pay unfussy homage helped remind casual viewers what, mainly, a network like ABC can pull off at this second in records — a live broadcast whose ambitions extended as a ways as credibly exciting, and that went on to satisfy them.