Social Wit List: December 2014

NEW YORK: In December, NBC's Peter Pan Live! garnered the most buzz in social media of all the new shows that premiered globally that month, with some 432,000 Facebook and Twitter comments, according to The WIT.

The conversations about NBC's live one-off event, which starred Girls' Allison Williams as Peter Pan and Christopher Walken as Captain Hook, were about it being #Bold, #Entertaining and #BetterThanLastYear (referencing The Sound of Music live special). Social media was also talking about the stars: #KudosAllisonWilliams and #WTFChristopherWalken.

Number two and three on the list of December's top-ten rankings of buzz-generating new programs were specials featuring the boy band One Direction. NBC's one-off One Direction: The TV Special garnered 369,000 tweets, and Italy's #1D4U – Concerto One Direction Roma on Italia1 drew 142,000 tweets, with plenty of buzz talk from #Directioners.

Discovery's factual special Eaten Alive ranked number four, with 94,000 tweets in social media. The one-off saw naturalist and wildlife filmmaker Paul Rosolie attempt (and fail) to capture a giant anaconda and enter its belly in a custom-built snake-proof suit. Conversations on social media were about the #HugeAnticipation yet #EpicFail of the promised action.

The first-ever edition of the BBC Music Awards on BBC One in Turkey drew 90,000 tweets. Many social media conversations were about the #StarFilled #Live #Music event, which featured performances from One Direction, Coldplay and Ed Sheeran, among others.

FOX's American Country Awards, the first edition of the ceremony honoring country music artists, also had social media chatting about it being #StarFilled and #Live. The event, which is based on country music's longest-running radio countdown show, American Country Countdown with Kix Brooks, had around 65,000 tweets. Some of which were discussing the #PopularRadioShow it stemmed from.

Also from the U.S., VH1's Sorority Sisters received around 60,000 tweets. The reality soap that follows the lives of African-American women from four different sororities in Atlanta had social media talking about the #Outrageous and #Disrespectful actions of its cast.

The Turkish period drama Diriliş "Ertuğrul", which aired on TRT1, had some social media commenters calling it the #TurkishGameofThrones and saying it was #Brilliant and #ActionPacked. Around 55,000 tweets went out in social media regarding the show.

Rounding out the list, at number ten, was NBC's broadcast of the PEOPLE Magazine Awards. The first edition of the awards ceremony—a celebration and recognition of the year's most influential and talked-about people in pop culture, celebrity and Hollywood, as voted by fans—had around 50,000 social media tweets, with many calling the event #StarFilled and commenting on the #Music and #Fashion.

Want this info in your inbox every month? Sign up for the Social Wit List from World Screen and The WIT here.