As a secondary school student (with a fair knowledge on lighting programming mind you) almost all lighting setups I’ve worked with have been assembled in a weekend, used for a week and then totally taken down in a weekend. I think for sound they used a digisnake (or smthng like that) to get all the connections down one cable, but for lighting I think maybe the universes were hard-wired, as they and the dimmers are one of the few things that stays the whole time,and then it was all sorted at the other end of the cable. Just my best guess here as I don’t fully remember how it worked in that show particularly.