No Day But Yesterday: “Rent Live” Wasn’t So Live

When I heard that Brennin Hunt, the dude who played Roger Davis in Fox’s live TV production of Jonathan Larson’s Rent, broke his ankle during a rehearsal the night before the live show was supposed to go down, I figured that his understudy pulled a Nomi Malone by pushing him down the stairs so that they could take the role and become an overnight STAH! But that didn’t happen, because Brennin Hunt didn’t have an understudy. None of the leads did. Fox decided to test fate by not getting the lead roles covered, and fate spit back by saying, “Wrong move, trick.”

So because a little thing called “a broken foot” kept Brennin from jumping on tables and running around, Fox decided to mostly scrap the live show. The bad news is that they aired a dress rehearsal from Saturday night. The good news for the actors who didn’t really give it their all during the dress rehearsal is that nobody really watched it. Rent: Not So Live flopped in the ratings with 3.42 million viewers. I mean, it got beat by America’s Funniest Home Videos.

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