For a lot of Smash’s first season I thought the better show I had seen in the pilot was being crushed. Forgotten and marginalized by the safer, more generic soap the series was becoming. The season finale didn’t totally allay those fears, but it shows more of that series I hoped Smash would be than any other episode since the pilot. “Bombshell” doesn’t completely right the ship, indeed it has more than enough head scratchingly poor decisions and reprises of awful plots, but it also springs to life as the series is forced to reorient itself on what it has been building to all along, the musical.
I was always going to come back and at least sample season 2 of Smash, changing showrunners is pretty much a guaranteed way to make me take another look at an underachieving series, but even if Theresa Rebeck was going to stay on as showrunner this episode probably would have convinced me to give Smash one more shot at making things work. Part of that is because it clears out some loose baggage, Ellis finally gets his walking papers from Eileen after he admits to poisoning Rebecca and while he claims that he’ll be back it’s a story and character that could easily be dropped in between seasons after all the backlash against him, but it’s also because the show is extremely compelling when it gets down to watching these people work. The episode has more than a few scenes that quietly delve into the professional lives of these characters and it’s kind of genuinely thrilling to see the give and take between Tom and Julia as they struggle to conjure up a new number with only hours before the show is set to start. The pair gently bicker and poke at each other while still forging ahead. The scenes almost effortlessly evoke the familiarity bred from years of friendship and working together in ways that feel real.
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I’m going to take the next two weeks off on Smash, I feel like I’ve said just about all I can at the moment, and return to talk about the finale. I’ve got one or two other things I need to focus on and that’s going to have to be one of the sacrifices to those concerns. Apologies for missing the reviews.
It’s going to seem a little crazy at first when I say it, but the problem with this week’s episode of Smash was the smoothies. Well, not so much the smoothies themselves but what they represent. The writers of the show have consistently struggled to find interesting or compelling ways to build drama around the production of Bombshell, and many times they’ll simply revert to tired clichés or the most easily manufactured conflict they can think of. When I saw that two of the series heavy creative hitters were behind this episode I thought things might change. Theresa Rebeck wrote a great pilot, and Michael Mayer did a fine job directing it, so when “Publicity” lands on Rebecca’s exacting instructions about smoothies as the diva trait that sends Derek over the edge I couldn’t help but be disappointed. It’s such an utterly trivial matter, and while having Rebecca force a stage manager into doing it is over the line that still doesn’t make it a compelling bit of television. All it does is make Rebecca seem like an entitled brat, a characterization that Smash tried to pull back on at the end of last week’s episode. Instead of continuing that more nuanced characterization of Rebecca this episode goes right back to showing her as an utterly self-obsessed hack with little in the way of objectivity as she brings Karen under her wing and eventually decides to steal the climactic musical number for herself even though she can’t sing and just last week suggested that Ivy and Karen help her out by carrying some of the tougher songs.
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I’ll say this for Uma Thurman, she’s not afraid to look bad. “The Movie Star” sets out early and often to establish that Rebecca Duvall might not be cut out for the world of Broadway. Well, might is a kind word there as she enters the rehearsal space and absolutely butchers one of Tom and Julia’s songs. It’s a performance so utterly atrocious I was kind of shocked that the crew simply went into crisis mode rather than outright firing Duvall. Obviously though, since this is the world of Smash, I shouldn’t have been expecting subtlety. Duvall’s only going to be bad until the show needs her to be good, and when it needs her to be good she’ll be just that, regardless of whether or not it makes sense with what’s come before.
As with most weeks on Smash, the problems that arise are largely because this isn’t a show that’s reinventing the mold, it’s playing things by the book and every plot line is maddeningly obvious in where its headed. To that effect we get more utterly glacial scenes between Dev and Karen that are leading to their inevitable breakup. This week Karen finds out that Dev’s been hiding his lost promotion from her and Dev starts to push Karen away with lies and drinks with his female co-worker/friend. Every member of the audience knows this is headed towards Karen having to choose between Bombshell and Dev, and I doubt she’ll end up with Dev in that scenario. The scenes have no flair or unique point of view and their end point is so transparent it kills any potential tension that they could be generating.
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“Understudy” isn’t a revelatory episode of Smash that corrects the problems the series has been having up until this point, but it is an episode that’s a good sight more enjoyable to watch than most of the hours the series has been putting out of late. The reason for that is the details. Smash isn’t the most wildly original show, and it has largely moved away from focusing heavily on the ins and outs of putting on a Broadway show, which has left the series in a place where it’s seemingly just going through the motions with bland relationship drama and love triangles. Those boring elements are still at play in “Understudy,” but the episode finds ways to cut many of them with more poignant details that make them specific to the world of Smash and its Broadway setting.
The best moment of the episode comes when Tom and Julia engage in their annual tradition of tracking down a production of their first musical as a way to mark their “anniversary” as a writing team. They wind up at a pretty not great High School production of the show, and while the singing is hardly rapturous it’s instantly more involving than any of the show’s bland cover performances have been up to this point because it grounds the specific relationship that Tom have Julia have in a detail that is at once unique to them and universally recognizable. The play is a touchstone for Tom and Julia, and seeing it out in the world, being interpreted by and inspiring the next generation of Broadway lovers is a fitting tribute to their shared time together. It’s the kind of raw emotional return to an earlier time in one’s life that we all search for, and why nostalgia will always be such a powerful force in our society and seeing it filtered through the world of Broadway musicals is a wonderfully affecting moment.
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For most of this week’s Smash I was left dumbfounded by the choices being made by the show’s writers. “Hell on Earth” is a big, broad, unsubtle hour of television that executes terribly just about every storyline it attempts to deal with. Late in the episode though a moment came that was so absurd, so profoundly idiotic that I was legitimately left wondering whether Smash had become some sort of twisted Sirkian melodrama that’s as much interested in jerking tears as it is in deconstructing the tropes of television dramas.
I was left in such a state during the duet Ivy and Karen share in Times Square after Ivy’s disastrous performance in Heaven on Earth. The pair cavort, dance, and attract a crowd of rapturous onlookers as they sing along to a keyboardist whose gimmick is featuring two dancing stuffed animals on his instrument. It’s textbook Smash style bad-cover musical number for most of the running time, featuring musicians coming out of the woodwork to lend unnecessary credence to the performance and severely auto-tuned vocals. Suddenly though, the episode cuts into a broad, sweeping camera move that’s entirely focused on one of the dancing stuffed animals, and I couldn’t help but feel that either director Paul McGuigan was playing at exposing the strange, surreal nature of the sequence through the juxtaposition of a dancing bear with the lame cuts to real dancing people, or that Smash had simply finally gone off the deep end and left behind any pretense of being a “serious” drama.
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For a little while, early on in the episode, I thought that Smash might be making some kind of effort to move past the flaws that were holding it back. It was spending time with parts of the show I wasn’t invested in, Leo’s court woes and Julia’s affair with Michael, but it was seemingly wrapping those stories up. With the help of Tom’s boyfriend the lawyer Leo’s charges were dismissed and Michael finally came to his senses and decided that it was for the best if he and Julia ended their affair. The latter was an out of left field moment, Michael claims he’s done with Julia because he truly loves his family even though he was utterly uninterested in them as recently as last week, but at least it was a moment that seemed to be the writers of Smash saying that they knew those plots were mistakes and that they were dropping them as quickly as they could manage.
That “The Coup” was written by the current show runner Theresa Rebeck, she’s stepping down from the lead role when the series comes back for its recently announced second season, made me think this was a case of the woman in charge putting her foot down and trying to steer the show towards its strengths. But then the episode just kept making the same mistakes the series has made time and time again, and in some respects it managed to be worse than the show has ever been. There are extraneous musical numbers, copious amounts of characters telling us how we should feel about how good or bad performances were, and a far too large helping of Dev’s ongoing woes at his job in city hall. There’s simply a lot of plot that feels extraneous to the actual thing that makes me want to watch Smash, the production itself, and what there is related to the production is hardly interesting.
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For a show about the big, brash world of Broadway it should be strange that I’m finding all the most rewarding moments in Smash to be the smallest. Smash isn’t proving itself particularly adept at going big, “The Workshop” is plagued by unnecessary reaction shots and underlining emotions that the viewer should be able to grasp without all the accentuation, but when it finds a small, unique detail to focus on it tends to come alive in surprisingly involving ways. It’s only too bad that to get at those more intriguing grace notes we’re forced through quite a bit of what’s troubled so many past episodes of Smash.
The episode starts off with just such a frustrating moment as Karen cuts some sort of demo for the unseen producer she impressed at last week’s Bar Mitzvah. While the engineer is at first put off by her overly theatrical style, we quickly begin to realize that he’s being won over thanks to a few ridiculously emphatic shots of him loving Karen’s singing. It’s another cover song sequence that just doesn’t work, partially because it’s auto-tuned to holy hell and partially because the song is just completely forgettable. That second part might come down to my taste, I’m not particularly into mainstream pop so I’m usually at sea when it comes to the choice of covers on Smash, but when the only way the audience can tell if a performance is good or not comes from superfluous reactions of other characters, it’s a problem.
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Sometimes it can be hard to think about the big picture of TV series when you’re watching it from week-to-week. It’s easy to get swept away by installments that suddenly seem to work and it’s equally easy to become a total cynic over episodes that seem to flounder despite the fact that the series has proven it can be very, very good. “Chemistry” is one of the latter episodes in that it’s pretty awful, but what I can’t stop thinking about is whether “Chemistry” is a sign that Smash will probably never be the show that I want it to be or a sign of the show being unable to deliver on its promise. The more I think about it though, the more I think it’s the former.
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“Let’s Be Bad” is the best episode of Smash since the pilot, it’s by no means perfect but it’s a solid hour of TV where the flaws present don’t strike me so much as warning signs but mild issues to be worked through as the series progresses. Problematic plots like Julia’s adoption persist, but they’re minor in comparison to the more effective stories that deal with the passions that drive our characters and the turmoil those passions can cause within their personal and professional lives. Those tensions are my favorite aspect of the show, well that and its setting, so seeing that aspect take center stage is quite satisfying.
One of the most impressive things about this episode is the ways that it manages to tie all of its plots into a cohesive whole even when they’re not directly intersecting with one another. It starts off in a clever pair of scenes, one where Julia and Michael share a piece of pie while barely hiding their flirtations and another where Tom barely manages to feign interest in conversation with his blind date from last week. In Julia’s scene she receives a call from an unfamiliar number and ignores it as most do, but when Tom is placed in the same situation and answers the phone it elegantly shows just how Julia is slipping back towards Michael while Tom just isn’t interested in his date. It’s smart writing that pulls the story forward while subtly weaving in character development. That it brings us more Leo, who remains awful, is only a minor strike against it.
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