If Theresa Rebeck wasn't let go of Smash...

...what would have happened? If she was still in control for Season 2, how would things have turned out? Would they be different (for better or for worse)?

There would have been no Hit List. There would have been Bombshell as the A story and the repairing of the Julia marriage and the adoption and the pregnancy, which she would have convinced her husband was his. The season would have ended with Bombshell finally opening on Broadway, with Karen as the most obvious bestest Marilyn in the world, Ivy in rehab, and Michael Swift showing up as Julia goes into labor, and putting the idea into Julia's husband's head that he, Michael Swift, was the baby's father. Carpet's pot addiction would relapse. There would have been many more scarves.

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Updated On: 6/11/13 at 06:57 PM

Season 1 was bad soap opera. They didn't know whether to do a show about theater or a soap opera. And so they wound up trying to do both which didn't work.

If they wanted to do a show about theater, they had the example of the wonderful "Slings and Arrows" to follow.

If they wanted to do a soap opera, they should have focused on the cat fights between the chorus boys, the anorexia of the chorus girls, the alcoholism of the stage manager, the slutty ways of the male lead, the misappropriation of funds by the box office, the diva behavior of the female lead, etc.

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Gothampc, I completely agree. Slings and Arrows a hidden gem. I love how smartly each character is written. Smash could have benefitted from the tightly written choas that makes Slings and Arrows shine.

^^Yes it would have been "As the Smash Turns" - way too much soap opera for my test (and I like soaps just not during Smash).

I would like to think however that maybe there might have been far less time pimping the "guest stars" which to me was basically a waste of time. I thought Bernadette Peters worked because they actually gave her a character - she was not a gimmick. I wasn't a fan of Uma but she too had a character. This year, Jennifer Hudson, Sean Hayes..just time fillers to get the audience to watch but if you can't get your core show working on it's own, it's just a waste.

I think though for both years there seemed to be too many cooks putting it all together and there was no clear vision of what the show should look like - which is why it was so uneven.

I would also like to think that Rebeck would not have had Safran's vision of turning Season 3 into the making a musical for the movies. Smash was supposed to be about the Broadway theater, not Hollywood. That's another show.

The whole show, in my subjective opinion, should have been loosely based on the experience creating Dance of the Vampires, which would make a great film, book, or show in and of itself. You saw allusions to it with Sean Hayes trying to turn a drama into a comedy in Season 2, but it never went all the way. I'd love to see someone use even half of what actually happened on DOTV in a series.

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Updated On: 6/12/13 at 09:36 AM

I did, too. I think more people would have been on board with him if he was less fey.

I thought he was kinda butch, like Anne Baxter.

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I still would rather watch SMASH then 90% of this crap they have on TV now they call "reality"