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The Epilogue begins with the Fox television hit series Glee, which premiered in 2009, and asks why and how this show harnessed the passion and engagement of mainstream audiences. Glee validated existing fans of musical theatre and created new audiences, too. It tapped into the emotional zeitgeist and spectators’ investment in musicals that began well before the 1950s when this book opens. This chapter considers how musical theatre conventions intersect with those of television and how musical theatre is a different form with different audience dynamics. The Epilogue asks if musical theatre-type television ultimately creates new audiences for musicals.

This chapter explores how fanfiction writers deploy characters from the television show Glee in the context of the It Gets Better anti-bullying YouTube project to imagine scenarios where the project’s teleological narrative fails to describe the lived experiences of queer youth. Glee reached peak popularity in 2010–2011, the year that It Gets Better was launched and queer YA began undergoing a publishing boom. In fanfiction that combines Glee with It Gets Better, fans repurpose It Gets Better to bring critical elements to the YouTube project that are missing from its official stories: sexual pleasure, and the possibility that it doesn’t always get better. These traces in material culture of young people writing back to It Gets Better, Mason concludes, illustrate problems with Jacqueline Rose’s argument about the untouched “middle space” between adult authors of children’s literature and the genre’s young audiences.

This chapter focuses on the rise and digital marketing of a spate of musical series between 2009 and 2019. It explores the specific methods used to address audiences of Fox’s Glee, NBC’s Smash, ABC’s Galavant, and The CW’s Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and how the shows’ industry-driven online footprints project both the television industry’s embrace of Web 2.0 techniques and varying methods of hailing fans of the Broadway musical. In various ways, these series blend techniques of Broadway and television fandoms and parlay theatrical language and stars into marketing tools, while acknowledging the contemporary power of online stardom in the cultivation of contemporary media texts. Whether through network websites, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, or via interactive gif-creators and contests, these four musical series hung their hopes on the promise of fan interactivity.

A generational change at the beginning of the twenty-first century intersected with the technological advance of the Internet to provide a renaissance of Broadway music in popular culture. Downloading playlists allowed the home listener to become, in essence, his/her own record producer; length, narrative, performer were now all in the hands of the consumer’s personal preference. Following in the footsteps of Rent (as a favorite of a younger demographic), Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton emerged as the greatest pop culture/Broadway musical phenomenon of the twenty-first century; its cast album and cover recording shot up near the top of music’s pop charts. A rediscovery of the power of Broadway’s music to transform listening and consumer habits seems imminent with the addition of Hamilton and Dear Evan Hansen to a devoted fan base—and beyond.

This chapter considers the ongoing, complicated relationship between musical film and television. By appropriating and borrowing from musicals in the 1950, TV contributed mightily to their downfall: seeing stars free on The Ed Sullivan Show, or in televised productions like Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Cinderella, could trump paying to seem such shows in movie theaters. Yet television also propagated musicals when they began to run (in black and white, with commercials) on the home screen. The Carol Burnett Show was especially astute in its musical parodies, while MTV and VH1 rechanneled old styles into flashily edited new forms. Later, Glee and Smash would both celebrate and distort movie musicals through a web of homage, skill, imitation, and frequent misunderstanding.

Meritocracy flourished most luxuriantly in Harvard’s professional schools. The Big Four—the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and the Schools of Law, Medicine, and Business—threw off the constraints of lack of money and student cutbacks imposed by World War II. The smaller professional schools—Public Health and Dentistry, Education, Divinity, Design—shared in the good times, though their old problems of scarce resources and conflicted missions continued to bedevil them. The major alteration in the Harvard postgraduate scene was the establishment of the Kennedy School of Government. By the time Derek Bok—as well disposed to the Kennedy School as Conant was to Education and Pusey to Divinity—became president in 1971, this new boy on the Harvard professional school block was well situated to capitalize on his good favor. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences remained, as in the past, rich in renown, poor in fund-raising and administrative autonomy. Between 1952 and 1962, fewer than 5 percent of GSAS alumni donated a total of about $60,000; during the early sixties giving went down to $3,000 a year. Its dean had little or no budgetary or curricular control; its faculty, curriculum, and student admissions were in the hands of the departments. In 1954 Overseer/Judge Charles Wyzanski grandly proposed that admissions to the Graduate School be sharply cut back. The reduction, he thought, would free up the faculty for more creative thought, improve undergraduate education, and upgrade the level of the graduate student body. But the post–Korean War expansion of American higher education led to boom years for the Graduate School. In 1961, 190 male and 60 female Woodrow Wilson Foundation Fellows, more than a quarter of the national total, chose to go to Harvard or Radcliffe; 80 of 172 National Science Foundation grantees wanted to go to Harvard. A 1969 rating of the nation’s graduate programs gave Harvard Chemistry a perfect 5, Mathematics 4.9, Physics, Biochemistry, Molecular Biology, History, and Classics 4.8, Art History and Sociology 4.7, English and Spanish 4.6, Philosophy and Government 4.5. Impressive enough, all in all, to sustain the faculty’s elevated impression of itself. But in the late sixties the Graduate School bubble deflated. Government aid, foundation fellowships, and college jobs declined; student disaffection grew.

Although a twenty-first-century bump in high-profile musical television programming like Glee and The Sound of Music Live! brought television’s relationship to the musical back into the popular cultural consciousness, the Hollywood and Broadway musical had always been part of the American television landscape. This chapter sets up this relationship and creates a road map for the seven-chapter exploration of the small screen’s romance with a foundational American art form. It further contextualizes the work within a broader view of popular music, early forms of musical platform convergence (e.g. Broadway with sheet music sales, radio, and motion pictures), existing scholarship, and the challenges of conducting such a historical study when copies of the primary focus of the research—the programming itself—no longer exist or never existed in re-viewable form.

This chapter describes Edward MacDowell's career outside Columbia University. These include his acceptance of the position of the Mendelssohn Glee Club's new director in the fall of 1896. The club was an exclusive men's chorus consisting largely of Manhattan businessmen. Edward also continued teaching piano despite the protests of university officials. The administration did not want its new professor to sully his hands with such menial labor, but it is no surprise that MacDowell ignored their advice. For him, the practical and the theoretical could not be separated, and thus piano teaching continued to play an important part in his life after the move to New York. MacDowell also continued to compose music.

As an extension of the early cinematic treatment of Rhapsody in Blue in chapter 2, this chapter focuses on film and television encounters with the piece from the last quarter of the twentieth century to the present, including Manhattan, Fantasia 2000, The Simpsons, Glee, and The Great Gatsby. Over time, a consensus emerges from such visual representation that closely aligns with conceptions of the piece as a sonic symbol of American ingenuity and success. Such formulations of the Rhapsody are precisely what United Airlines had in mind when it selected the piece as its corporate jingle in the late 1980s. However, the inherent flexibility of the Rhapsody has resulted in its seemingly limitless adaptability for the company. A consideration of arrangements of the piece as used in commercial advertisements and the terminal at O’Hare International Airport reveals how United has imbued the Rhapsody with a host of associations beyond those taken up by Hollywood.