One of NBC’s few, highly-rated new shows last year was Smash, a drama about trying to get a new musical onto Broadway. The season’s final episode was last Monday, and it’s been renewed for a new year. But was season one of Smash good enough for viewers to check back in for another season?
There’s no doubt that Smash started strong. The premise of the show – a look backstage at the artistic and financial struggles of a Broadway show coming to life – has tremendous potential, but it could have been painful if the musical developing before our eyes wasn’t a credible theatrical production. That’s not a problem with “Bombshell,” the fictional play in Smash that is a musical treatment of Marilyn Monroe’s life: it is packed with razzle-dazzle, catchy songs, and flashy choreography. Smash passes the first and most important test for a series dramatizing the behind-the-scenes action of a Broadway play: the show itself is entertaining, and something you can easily imagine on Broadway.
The cast is also loaded with talent. Veteran actresses Angelica Houston and Debra Messing play the show’s producer and lyricist/co-writer, respectively, and both do a fine job bringing their characters to life. The two central characters are the actresses vying to play the lead role of Marilyn Monroe in the play. Ivy Lynn is a singer/dancer with extensive experience in the chorus who has still never played a star part. Ivy is scheming, underhanded, and willing to do whatever it takes to finally break through, and she’s played to perfection by Megan Hilty, who has a strong stage pedigree but relatively little acting experience.
Ivy’s competition is Karen Cartwright, a wide-eyed ingénue who just stepped off the turnip truck and into the big city for the first time. Her innocence is underscored by the fact that she’s from Iowa, which everyone in Hollywood and New York knows is the embodiment of rustic cluelessness. Karen is played by Katherine McPhee, a finalist in season five of American Idol who also has little acting experience. Her performance throughout the season was consistently strong and, to me at least, surprising, because I disliked her on American Idol. However, McPhee’s role on Smash shows that she’s become a very strong singer, and she makes her character credible and sympathetic.
Ivy is originally selected to play the part of Marilyn, with Karen as a kind of understudy, but there are many twists and turns on the road to Broadway, and they lead to an agonizing amount of uncertainty about who will ultimately be Marilyn. This is not definitively settled until the final moments of the last episode. The back and forth struggle between Karen and Ivy for the part – a struggle later joined by a bonafide Hollywood star played by Uma Thurman – practically turn the issue of who will play Marilyn into a battle between good and evil. It’s a bit more nuanced than that, though, particularly because we learn that Ivy is a tragic figure who may be headed towards a Marilyn Monroe-type crackup herself.
All this is well and good, and it kept me hooked from week to week. But I was disappointed with how things ended up, in part because I thought the wrong actress was finally chosen to play Marilyn (no spoilers here), but mostly because the depth and quality of the early episodes noticeably declined as the season progressed. The writing became more hackneyed, and by the end Smash bordered on being a generic soap opera transported to a theatrical set. A famous playwright once said all’s well that ends well, but Smash didn’t end well at all. In fact, the ending was a bit of a rushed, embarrassing mess, which is ironically what the play’s producers and writers feared would happen with “Bombshell.”
Nevertheless, there are enough interesting loose ends to give Smash one more chance when it returns. I’m not optimistic that the show’s creators will deal with them successfully, but it’s worth giving Smash a few weeks to see if the series re-captures the verve and complexity of the first two-thirds or so of season one.
