A cappella, which for years has largely thrived primarily via barbershop quartets and college singing groups, has had its moment since roughly 2009. That year marked the premiere of Glee, which wasn't a show about an a cappella group but was certainly a cappella-adjacent, as well as the NBC competition program The Sing-Off. In 2012, the movie Pitch Perfect, about a female a cappella group, became a surprise smash, spawning two sequels and a spin-off series.
A year before Pitch Perfect's release, NBC decided to expand The Sing-Off from a short-form show that ran 4 or 5 episodes in December to a 11-episode, fall-spanning series. The winner that year was Pentatonix, a quintet consisting of three high school friends (tenor Mitch Grassi, baritone Scott Hoying, and soprano Kirstin Maldonado, none of whom were even 20 when they won) and two others, base Avi Kaplan and beatboxer Kevin Olusola. Though winning The Sing-Off didn't result in instant success for the group, their win did lead to the success of their YouTube channel, which eventually got them a recording contract, and have since released a steady stream of successful albums, some standard issue, some Christmas.
It was through the promotion of their 2016 album that led to them returning to NBC for A Pentatonix Christmas Special. This proved to be a fairly typical album-promoting variety special of the late teens, consisting of a combination of talking head segments, on-stage performances in front of a studio audiences, and supposedly spontaneous, actually carefully scripted encounters with celebrities who happily joined them in singing a song.
Among the songs that the group sang in front of an audience were NSYNC's "Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays", "Mary Did You Know", "Joy to the World", "O Come All Ye Faithful", "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing", and Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah", before concluding with their original "That's Christmas to Me", over home video footage of the group as kids.
Between the stage performances, the group just happened to encounter Reba McEntire waitressing at a Nashville diner, where she joined them on "Winter Wonderland". Later, they supposedly show up unannounced to Kelly Clarkson's house, where she sang "I'll Be Home For Christmas" with them. In between, Dolly Parton (who had joined them on a cover of her own "Jolene" earlier that year) sang "Silent Night" after giving them ugly Christmas specials. There was also an animated segment turning the group into Lego figures that sang "Up on the Housetop".
NBC would bring the group back for further specials in 2017 and 2018. In the meantime, Kaplan would leave the group and be replaced by Matt Sallee. After a hiatus from specials for several years, in 2022, the group produced a new special, this time for Disney+.
Unlike their prior special, Pentatonix: Around the World for the Holidays had an actual, if rather ridiculous plot. Accidently locked in a magical mail room by their manager (Superstore's Nico Santos), the group pass the time by reading their fan mail, with each letter coming from someone in a different part of the world. Naturally, the special would then go and meet each of the letter writers, who would describe their lives and their holiday traditions. Among the letter writers is an aspiring teenage singer in Japan, another teenager in Grenada (the homeland of Olusola's mother), a pre-teen in Iceland, another tween in Ghana, and a teenage girl in Mexico. Each segment ends with the letter writer singing a song, such as "Last Christmas" "Silent Night", "Joy to the World", "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year", or "Feliz Navidad". This being Disney+, it has to include a Disney song, so it ends with everyone singing along to "It's a Small World".
By far the best part of the special were the documentary-like looks at each of the cultures the teens and tweens came from. While the group sounded good on their songs, the dialogue sequences are incredibly cheesy. I'd rather they all had been dropped in favor of more footage of the letter writers. Plus, I couldn't help but think that the mustache Grassi has grown, combined with his outfit, makes him look like he wandered off the set of Scarface.
Neither Pentatonix special is particularly noteworthy, but I appreciated the rather formulaic A Pentatonix Christmas Special over Pentatonix: Around the World for the Holidays. This one would have been improved, I suspect, by actually sending them around the world, or, as I said, just dropping Pentatonix.
Next time: The 2022 version of Generic Special Where Misfits Have to Save Christmas
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