Pentatonix is a collection of fresh-faced, earnest, and extremely bland a cappella singers who have somehow made an indelible impression on American middlebrow culture. They are now on Thanksgiving floats. They have albums and tours that sell out. They take songs previously enjoyed by the general public and make them very bad. None of these things are admirable but in the spirit of the holidays, I’d like to turn to the one thing about Pentatonix that is: they are absolutely incapable of feeling embarrassment.
The plot of Not So Silent Night, the Pentatonix holiday special that aired on NBC Monday night, is thin. The Pentatonix are assembled in Las Vegas and somehow, they have lost their memory—the result of a spell cast on them by Penn and Teller, two men who are not actually magicians. This magic spell explains why the tall blonde one is dressed like a gladiator. It also explains why the short brunette with the three birds in flight tattooed on the back of his hands is dressed like a lounge singer from 1957. Nothing explains what happened to the woman in Pentatonix, Kristin Maldonado, who spends the duration of this special with one foot in an air cast, standing on one leg when she wasn’t wheeling herself around on an office chair or this contraption, below.