Smash was to revitalize both NBC and Broadway. Things didn’t quite work out that way.
As I was driving home with my sister the other day, I asked her how she felt about the cancellation of the NBC show Smash.
She laughed and told me she hadn’t even been keeping up with it this season.
That took me by surprise. After all, she was the one who had gotten me into the show, so deeply that I binge-watched the entire first season on my couch over a few days last summer break, glued to the dance routines and the over-the-top musical numbers and the show’s gushy drama.
It was my guilty pleasure.
Audiences quickly predicted its success after its pilot episode, calling it the “anti-Glee.” It was a new take on the singing television show, and its song and dance numbers were gorgeous. But it suddenly flopped, plagued with unfocused writing and too much sappy drama. Even before its start, it had a formula that was destined for doom: a setting within a too-niche interest and the absence of that very human drive for success.
Smash is the story of a team that writes a fictitious musical about Marilyn Monroe’s rise and fall, titled Bombshell. As is typical with many Broadway shows, it endures financial problems, squabbles between creative teams and casting arguments. Bombshell focuses on relationships, cheating and sex, too, in the political process of creating a Broadway hit. In the end, the musical wins its coveted Tony awards.
Critics raved about the series’ first episode, especially the final number, when Ivy Lynn (Megan Hilty) and Karen Cartwright (Katharine McPhee) went head-to-head in an audition with the belty showstopper “Let Me Be Your Star.” It gave me goose bumps the first time I watched the episode — two people singing about the universal craving for fame and fortune and success. It’s the heart of theater, and getting non-theatergoers to understand its universal ideas through song and desire was brilliant.
I thought Smash had done it — found a way to revitalize theater and bring it into a world shifting away from live performance and to digital media. A way to broadcast theater’s principles on the big screen and save the art form, so to speak.
Then it all seemed to spiral out of control. Unnecessary relationships between characters. Creator Theresa Rebeck leaving Smash’s production team after conflicts with the network. And then, plotlines that didn’t make sense emerged. (Bringing in Uma Thurman to take the role of Marilyn? Really?) Early on, a plotline about composer Julia Houston’s (Debra Messing) adoption drew focus away from the show’s heart.
Smash didn’t start again until midseason in February, was moved to Saturdays in April and was finally canceled in May, with its last episode serving as its series finale.
The show was lined with stars on the creative team — Steven Spielberg was an executive producer, and the show was composed by the team behind the musical Hairspray, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. In trying so hard to make a smash out of Bombshell and a smash out of Smash, creators forgot the soul that drew viewers to the show in the first place: the tug-of-war of craving fame that was so clear in the series’ pilot — the vulnerability of desire and the need for success.
diversionsdbk@gmail.com
