How can the small screen contain her? Television, genre and the twenty-first-century Broadway diva onslaught

Despite her continued presence on American television, the Broadway diva's theatrical grandiosity has often pushed up against television form and displayed a contentious relationship with stylistic specificities of the box-bound medium. This article posits that the twenty-first-century television industry has shifted in various ways, allowing for a more nuanced symbiotic relationship between the diva and television programming. Old and new divas alike have become staples of network, cable and streaming content, with such iconic figures as Liza Minnelli, Elaine Stritch, Patti LuPone and Audra McDonald appearing and reappearing on TVs and mobile devices across America. Importantly and much more often than in previous eras, these Broadway divas have been able to embrace their true divadom across genres (e.g. live musicals, melodramas and sitcoms). Highlighting a perfect storm of shifts in marketing, genre (gendered genre) and viewing habits, I position millennial television as a natural home for Broadway's grande dames.