It was popular. Don’t let those brigading against the mere idea of a musical distort the facts.

Some of the review sites like IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes ended up with average scores in the 7/70% range merely because of the large number of 1/10 votes.

If you check out the vote distribution, it was a small but very vocal minority who opposed the episode on principle, who created the impression that it wasn’t well received by the fandom.

Personally, I’m not a huge fan of American musicals, but I enjoyed and have certainly included it in my rewatches already.

Lol I'm literally watching Once more with feeling. Decided to watch all musical episodes I could find.