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Poor Neil Patrick Harris: he was born a couple of decades too late. The song-and-dance man, who last year won a Tony Award for his performance in Broadway’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch, leapt onto the primetime stage last night with his live one-hour variety show Best Time Ever. Variety show, you say? In 2015? It’s true. And Harris proves himself as worthy a jester-king of his court as Sid Caesar and Carol Burnett were in days gone by. But those days have, by definition, gone by. And Carol Burnett never had to contend with Twitter. Is it possible for such a manic, daffy, and sincere show to exist in a cultural era defined by sarcasm and irony? Neil Patrick Harris and his team are betting on it, and — to my great surprise — I’m with them.

Though, it seems, I’m in the minority. I made the mistake of clicking on the #BestTimeEver Twitter hashtag while watching the show last night. People were saying NPH should stick to acting (Should he? His How I Met Your Mother character was pure caricature. And did anyone really buy his darker turn in Gone Girl?) or hosting award shows (while closer to utilizing Harris’s immense talent, he only really shined in opening numbers, often falling flat when relegated to an award show script or, worse, trying to squeeze his penchant for magic into the Oscars telecast). The fact of the matter is that Harris is not really an actor and not really a host — he’s a showman. He’s P.T. Barnum, he’s spinning plates while tap dancing, he’s a jack of all trades. Is it really fair to fault him for being a master of none?

Best Time Ever — the hyperbolic name even seems designed to court derision — is unhinged and slapdash. It has the desperate theatre camp feeling of, “Hey, kids, let’s put on a show!” People critiqued the cheesy writing, but that’s the point! The variety show has always been the home base of corn-ball humor, silly wordplay, and general fluff. Best Time Ever is not designed to deliver pointed social commentary the way, say, Last Week Tonight is. It’s meant to be a respite from a shitty day at work, from the troubles of the world outside. It’s meant to be a circus.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jceA9kqGxu4]

In an age where late night TV is dominated by (mostly) straight, white men interviewing Jeb Bush or any ingénue with a movie coming out that week, Best Time Ever calls on celebrities to be a part of — or sometimes even the butt of (hi, Carrot Top!) — the joke. Maybe it doesn’t make for, as many on Twitter noted, the Best Time Ever. But it’s ambitious and wild and flies in the face of run-of-the-mill network programming. Where else, in 2015, can you find Nicole Scherzinger, Gloria Gaynor (who sounded incredible), Reese Witherspoon (ziplining!), Carson Daly (R.I.P. TRL), the judges of The Voice, a Pitbull song, flustered civilians plucked from the audience, and — yes — Carrot Top (holding a fish) all on one show? It’s Candid Camera meets Battle of the Network Stars meets Punk’d, and this generations-spanning DNA is part of what I believe will cause this show to succeed.

Previously.TV’s Tara Ariano — who had one of the funniest Twitter feeds during last night’s telecast — asked, “Whom is this show for?” The answer is: everyone not watching it for the express purpose of making funnies on Twitter. Kevin Fallon at The Daily Beast wrote, “There was not one bit from Best Time Ever that I could not see my great-aunt Susan or my parents’ neighbor Gail sharing on Facebook, tagging their book club members in the comments and accruing dozens of likes. The show was essentially a collated version of those ‘You Wouldn’t Believe What Happened When…’ videos and headlines that thrive on social media and viral monitors like BuzzFeed or Upworthy.” From those old timers who remember the golden age of variety shows to tweens getting their news solely from BuzzFeed listicles, all fall within Best Time Ever’s desired demographic.

But perhaps there’s a subset in there for which the show doesn’t quite land: those millennials who, coming up in the ‘90s and early 2000s, were instead raised on reality television and snark, and who have outgrown the charms of “punking” celebrities, having been nearly bludgeoned into oblivion for hours of Ashton Kutcher’s antics. But, then again, I fall into that subset. (Oh my God, am I secretly a Polyanna? I might secretly be a Polyanna.) But those who can’t appreciate the unabashed audacity of this show are probably better suited to find their escapist bliss elsewhere. The rest of us can remain rapt while Neil Patrick Harris juggles, sings and dances, delivers his cheesy one liners, does a back flip off a pogo stick, and, against all odds, sticks the dismount.

Brett Barbour is a writer who lives in Brooklyn and is prone to binge-watching.

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