NBC's SMASH - Series & Broadway Adaptation Thread — Page 37

""Smash" is NBC's top drama in viewers in the 18-49 demographic most important to advertisers. It is also a favorite of NBC entertainment chairman Bob Greenblatt."

Greenblatt is overall one of my favorite TV producers--from Six Feet Under to the early seasons of some of his Showtime projects like Dexter, he's done great stuff. He's still new to NBC and I appreciate that he brought Smash with him from Showtime, but I still wish it had stayed on cable.

"Yeah, send the kid to college next season. His monologue about wanting a baby sister was just execrable,"

And that's why it's again, down to the writing, as awful an actor as the son is. The son pops up (in this case, thankfully) only to further the plot--otherwise he's forgotten for episodes at a time.

They really do need to reconvene and figure out what characters work, why the work, and how they're gonna make them work even better. They cannot keep having Debra Messing stuck with all these bad characters and ask her to be the only one who has presence in her scenes. I want to see more of her relationship with Tom, I want to see her and Anjelica Huston form some sort of friendship or maybe even a tense relationship, they need to stop doing the typical wife-cheats-on-husband storyline that we've seen in so many soaps before. Clearly she has no chemistry with her husband, she has no chemistry with Will Chase (regardless of their off-screen romance), and she has no chemistry with her son. Messing gives such a magnetic performance, it's a shame to see her get the crappy storylines like someone else said.
They also gotta figure out who Ivy is and what they want to do with Anjelica Huston. I feel like the show has soooo much potential, it could really be something special but it needs a showrunner that's not afraid to get in there, fire a few people (bye Ellis), and give the show what it needs. The problem with network shows is that the executives mess too much with the series, so I completely agree that this should have always been a cable show.

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In addition to better scripts for season 2, of course, I would like to see more authenticity concerning the theater setting. Even though I'm just a layperson, I can tell that some of the details are laughable, such as when when McPhee's fellow chorines advised her to blow off the workshop at the last minute, that no one would mind. Even I could tell that was ridiculous! How could Rebeck let stuff like that through? The new showrunner should get some theater consultants in, and listen to them. Heck, hire a couple of people from this board!

The Broadway setting is the best thing about Smash. I agree that the acting is decent, with one or two exceptions, and the characters have potential. It could be a great show!

Parts of the This Life reunion (was it called Afterlife?) were good I admit. I hated the reality tv concept and it just was kinda a downer. The show could be too, but not squeezed into 80 minutes. Or was Afterlife a different show--I do love Lesley Sharp.

Plum, I agree about the lack of a voice. While I think some soap opera is needed, I use the term loosely (in the way The West Wing was a soap).

Actually, the theater inacurracies are not what bother me more in this show... It's just so...predictable. To me it looks like a caricature of musical theater, both in the characters and plotlines. I wish they would attach themselves to doing something that hasn't already been done hundreds of time... Oh well.

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I think the big miscalculation Theresa Rebeck (and other producers, I'm sure) made was that the show needed to heavily emphasize the soap aspects of the plot in order to make the more "insider" theatrical elements relevant to a mainstream audience. In reality, the audience is completely turned off by the soap aspect and heavily responding to the parts that deal with the creative process, since that's what the show is really about. Anything that's not about the MARILYN musical and the drama in creating it feels superfluous and a waste of time, and that's what's dragging down any and all momentum within the story (that includes the affair subplot, the weird Eileen/ Ellis friendship, etc.)

The biggest, most gaping mistake to me is that they've created this central rivalry between Ivy and Karen, with Ivy acting like there's constantly a source of tension between them, and yet that's not actually happening. Are the writers forgetting that the two of them have, in reality, only ever had two scenes together? Where is their interaction? Ivy comes off crazy and even more unlikable for being as threatened by Karen as she is because you're never shown anything remotely close to substantiating her feeling that way.

What the new showrunner of the series really needs to do is figure out which characters have relevance to the central storyline of the show and focus the action accordingly. Why, for example, is Brian d'Arcy James singing in that clip for this week's episode? It seems completely pointless and unnecessary. "We have Brian d'Arcy James, so let's let him sing!" It's funny to me that many of the people involved with the show made it a huge point to say in the press that the difference between this and GLEE was that the songs in SMASH would always be rooted within the world of the story, but there's just as many unrealistic breaks into song as there are in any other musical series.

Related to what I was saying earlier, they also really need to get a grip on what people are responding to and what they aren't and why. From what I've gathered, audiences are almost universally turned off by the Will Chase character and the Ellis character, and I think a lot of that has to do with how unnecessary they feel (not to mention how horribly irredeemable they've been written to be.) In the first season of a show, you have to strongly establish your lead characters before you can shift focus to any secondary ones, and that's something the SMASH team seems to be completely clueless about.

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Updated On: 3/25/12 at 02:00 PM

It's hard to pick just one big error for Smash to correct, but yeah, the centrality of the Ivy/Karen rivalry is definitely a bad one, especially because this show specializes in telegraphing its plot points well in advance. Absolutely nothing happens that wasn't made glaringly obvious beforehand, and that applies all the more to the Karen vs. Ivy thing, because of course Karen's going to win; they couldn't be more obvious about that if they stuck a THIS GIRL HERE IS THE STAR sign in neon above her head. And sure, sometimes the journey is fun enough to make an obvious destination worth it, but that's not really the case here. And the worst part is that even when she's holding herself back, Hilty clearly has better chops than McPhee for the part. Oy.

Smash clearly wants to do with Marilyn Monroe's biography what Slings & Arrows did with Hamlet, Macbeth, and Lear - weave the show-within-a-show's plot into the characters' lives, blur the line between the developing musical and the lives of the people working on it, have Karen and Ivy and Julia and Eileen all be aspects Marilyn at different times. (And I do like how that fact has made the show so female-driven.) It's just that that's hard as hell to do, and made even more difficult for Smash by the musical aspect. The reason I got so excited at the end of the pilot was because "Let Me Be Your Star" made it work, but that alchemy has unfortunately been really rare in the rest of the show, and certainly not the binding central thread it should be in order to keep things coherent and give the whole enterprise a point.

So. They could start by choosing their jukebox numbers more carefully instead of taking the Glee approach of "whatever contemporary pop song that kind of fits". They can start coming up with a structure for Marilyn, so that that structure can be reflected in the characters' lives, instead of just repeatedly naming men Monroe was connected with and hoping that adds up to a plot.

Oh, and the writers can take two seconds to think through their characterizations, because as long as those remain flat, the less-talented actors (hi, McPhee) are going to keep flailing. Jack Davenport can make Derek's writing work because he's Jack Davenport - the guy playing Ellis, for instance, doesn't have the ability to make a similar save. Does Ellis have any life purpose beyond eavesdropping and ass-kissing? Or at least an end goal for all his behavior? The writing isn't telling, and the actor doesn't have the ability to make the character work in spite of that. If the characters are going to stay flat, I hope they at least turn likable so I don't spend good chunks of every episode wanting to thwack someone upside the head.

I would venture to say that's not accurate, EricMontreal. For example, if you look at the comments on the Deadline article about Theresa Rebeck stepping down (which implied that parts of the show were too insidery,) the comments overwhelmingly indicated that the people there who aren't anywhere near theater insiders enjoyed the most specific aspects of the show the most and the soapier aspects the least.

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We can debate it back and forth, but it all comes down to the fact that the show just isn't well done. It's heavy-handed, badly paced, sloppy, unfocused, and really unsure of what it wants to be.

Here's hoping a showrunner with strong creative insight comes in to sort out what's been made a mess of and better articulate the artistic direction the show needs to take take in season two.

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Updated On: 3/26/12 at 07:57 PM

OK, I definitely agree with both points there.

^^^ Yes, that is correct. The TWoP posters are complaining about the soapy aspects and like the theater insidery material. TWoP may be a niche, but the site consistently attracts the best, most intelligent commentary in my opinion.

The sad thing is, apart from not looking AT ALL like Joe DiMaggio, Will Chase is giving a good performance as him, and his vocals are tremendous. But I want to see him gone too.