I am embarrassed to admit that I became hooked last season on the TV show Smash, the much-hyped, Steven Spielberg executive-produced nighttime soap opera about a new musical biography of Marilyn Monroe slowly lurching its way towards a Broadway opening.
If the title sounds familiar, maybe you are familiar with Garson (Born Yesterday) Kanin’s 1980 novel of the same name about a Broadway tryout. Its adaptation rights were bought for the series, but clearly only the title was used. If you know Kanin’s book, you are probably a theater fan, which makes you both part of the target market for the TV show and too smart for some of the depictions of what goes on in the rehearsal room and backstage as a musical is born.
In short, as theater online chat rooms can attest, Smash is a series that theater fans love to hate, a car crash of a show they cannot quite bring themselves to look away from. So Sunday’s Super Bowl may have been must-see-TV for football fanatics (and anyone intrigued by new, expensive commercials), but this Tuesday’s two-hour broadcast of Smash’s second season premiere is the Super Bowl equivalent for theater geeks.
To briefly set the scene for everyone else, the writing team of Julia Houston (Debra Messing) and Tom Levitt (Christian Borle) are birthing a show that will be called Bombshell. It is to be about La Monroe, although as everyone recalls ― astutely ― the subject was tried before and it flopped badly.
Before much of the show is written, auditions are held and the lead role quickly comes down to Ivy Lynn (Megan Hilty), a veteran chorus girl currently appearing in Houston and Levitt’s latest hit, Heaven on Earth, or Karen Cartwright (Katharine McPhee), who is talented, but green, right off the bus from Iowa. Mirroring the characters, Hilty has some solid Broadway credits (Wicked, the Dolly Parton role in 9 to 5), while McPhee’s claim to fame is appearing on the reality competition American Idol.
Predictably, theater chat room denizens insisted last year that Hilty was better qualified for the Monroe role, as they thumbed their noses at McPhee. But a few episodes in, it became apparent that McPhee has the goods and was outsinging and outsteaming Hilty. Maybe it was planned all along that way, but eventually, after the role switched back and forth between the two characters in a head-scratching series of events, McPhee earned the leading role at least during the Boston tryouts.
In almost any TV series these days, there is a tension between realism and soap opera, between playing to the natural audience (theater geeks, in this case) and pandering to a larger, far less theater-savvy viewership for the sake of the almighty audience share. Often, say on a quality series like L.A. Law or The West Wing, it can take years for the soap opera to win out, though it almost always does. With Smash, the shift towards the casting couch, assorted treachery and the injection of such stars as Bernadette Peters and Uma Thurman probably began with the arrival of the first overnight ratings.
As was much ballyhooed from the start, the creative force behind Smash and its “show runner,” the person who made the week-in, week-out story decisions, was playwright Theresa Rebeck (Mauritius, Seminar). And it was almost as widely reported when Rebeck was fired at the end of Season One and replaced by Joshua Safran of Gossip Girl. OK, I’ll admit that I’ve never seen Gossip Girl, but this move does not sound like Smash is moving in the direction of greater theatrical verisimilitude.
Saran has announced that he is weeding out various secondary characters, such as Julia’s husband Frank (Brian D’Arcy James) and Dev Sundaram (Raza Jaffrey), Karen’s politico boy friend. Neither one is much of a loss. The only pink-slipped character I will miss is Tom and Julia’s weaselly assistant, Ellis (Jaime Cepero), who did spice things up even though, in the real world, he would have been fired for his meddling shenanigans in the pilot episode.
The idea had long been floated that if Smash were a hit, the show within the show about Monroe could actually go to Broadway, since its songs would be pre-sold to audiences from their television exposure. In fact, Smash’s biggest asset is its original score, penned by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the wags who gave us Hairspray. And, in fact, numbers like Let Me Be Your Star, The National Pastime and Mr. & Mrs. Smith are as good as anything on Broadway recently and way better than Shaiman and Wittman’s work on Catch Me If You Can.
But the question which show would go to Broadway ― the Monroe biography Bombshell or Smash, a show about the making of Bombshell. Or, here’s a thought, a show based on the making of Smash, with all the intrigue of Rebeck and Safran battling it out for the upper hand.
In any event, as much as the musical numbers make be smile and the story details make me wince, I’ll be tuned in to catch where the show is headed in season two. If you are a Smash newbie, the initial season is now available in a handsome DVD package, a four-disc set of all 15 episodes, plus the requisite (though superfluous) deleted scenes, some extended musical numbers and a pretty painful gag reel.
I suppose this is evidence that the show has enough of a following to justify a second season, even if it feels like it has already jumped the shark.
Smash can be seen at 9 p.m. (8 p.m. CST) Tuesdays on NBC.