Allison Williams says you cannot hate-watch 'Peter Pan Live'

NBC successfully helped trail-blaze the concept of hate-watching with last year’s campy A Sound of Music Live! and 2012’s far less campy musical drama Smash.

But Allison Williams, the star of NBC’s second live musical high-wire act (literally) says hate-watching Thursday night’s Peter Pan Live is not a good idea. The actress, who is also on HBO’s ultra-cynical Girls, told The Daily Beast: “I will say this about last year: today’s audiences like to watch things cynically. And I’m on a show that’s cynical in tone so I’m no stranger to that … Hate-watching is a thing. It’s a whole way of watching something, and it’s not an audience that’s natural to a non-cynical performance. Peter Pan, you cannot watch cynically. If you do, you’re going to hate it, no question. It falls apart instantly.”

Her Peter Pan Live! co-star (and A Sound of Music Live! survivor) Christian Borle added: “I don’t mind going on record saying that I was mesmerized by the actors in our community who were so snarky about Sound of Music on Twitter. I just thought, ‘Don’t you ever want to work for NBC? They’re reading all of this.’ Also, just be nice. I don’t understand the impulse to tear down.”

See the full story for more thoughts from the cast, and here’s our first look at the all-digital Tinkerbell and five things we learned from the making-of special.