Little Big Shots mixes kids’ cuteness with talent
How do these crazy things happen? Big TV hits arrive seemingly out of nowhere, just when we’ve accepted the assumption that broadcast television is so diminished, so splintered, so time-shift - viewed, that massive weekly communal viewing experiences are officially bygone.
Then along comes Little Big Shots, NBC’s children’s talent - variety show.
This past Sunday’s edition, the third, was seen by 13.2 million viewers in the United States — by far the high-water mark for a regularly scheduled series this week and (indeed) this season. (Needless to say, the show should again top this week’s Nielsen’s ratings.)
The show seemed to come from out of the blue. Or did it?
Let’s go to the reasons why Little Big Shots is TV’s champ of the moment:
Steve Harvey: Never overlook the obvious, and Harvey as host is the obvious.
An Original King of Comedy (the touring group of AfricanAmerican comics, which also included D.L. Hughley, Cedric the Entertainer and Bernie Mac) is terrific here — a master at the slow deadpan, of the fast uptake, of the laugh that appears both spontaneous and genuine. Harvey, as fans know, has been at this kind of television for a very long time. He knows how to read studio audiences and work them, plus his improv skills are top-notch.
Harvey has also been around long enough (30-plus years) to have built a layered fan base, from older to younger. While his stand-up back in the day was not exactly squeaky clean, it was clean enough. He is not Chris Rock, in other words. That makes him not only a familiar presence, but, to a lot of viewers, a comfortable one as well.
Family viewing: Ellen DeGeneres — one of the executive producers along with Harvey — said when the show got a second-season pickup last week that “when it’s over, you won’t have to explain what happens in the fantasy suite.”
She’s not wrong. This isn’t The Bachelor, and that alone leaves the door open, with the doormat reading “Welcome” instead “Beware.”
The earliest form of TV: Little Big Shots is the oldest and sturdiest format on television, dating back even to an era when there was no TV, and to showmen such as Ted Mack and Art Linkletter, the latter one of the most successful personalities on both media.
Linkletter’s House Party began on radio just five months before the end of the Second World War and lasted until 1969. The CBS daytime version aired from 1952.
House Party was a variety show in the purest sense of the word “variety” — a little bit of this (audience participation quizzes) and that (guest interviews). But the enduring bit over a nearly three-decade stretch was a segment called “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” in which Linkletter debriefed children.
Bill Cosby revived the segment as a 1998-2000 series on CBS, but as a cultural and TV fixture — kids saying the darndest things — it has cropped up in dozens of shows before and since.
Mack’s Original Amateur Hour offered much of the same over its years on various networks, famously showcasing Gladys Knight as a child performer, and Pat Boone.
Kids really do say the darndest things: The kids have been cute (that doesn’t hurt) and talented (that either), or just talented at being cute (best of all).