Does NBC Have a "Smash" Hit On Its Hands?

Megan Hilty and cute boys in sparkly baseball uniforms - Just two of Smash's many valuable assets

After months of hype and weeks of Facebook statuses about how much more awesome Smash is going to be than Glee, the NBC musical drama about the creation of a Broadway show finally aired on TV last night.  And I have to say, I enjoyed it.  A lot.  Am I obsessively addicted to it, ready to devour any and all information I can lay my clammy little fanboy hands on?  No.  But I will certainly be tuning in next week to see where things go after a very solid pilot.

First off, I want to say that any comparisons to Glee are apples to oranges comparisons.  Whereas Glee is primarily aimed at young girls with attention spans no longer than a typical YouTube video (and gays who act like said young girls), Smash is aimed squarely at adults.  This goes a long way towards explaining why it is already functioning on a higher level than the Fox series, since most adults won’t put up with the kind of nonsensical shenanigans that occur with alarming frequency at McKinley High.

Thankfully, the characters in Smash are all reasonably coherent, believable people who behave in consistent and mostly logical ways.  I say mostly because it is a tad suspicious that such an on-the-ball personal assistant to a famous Broadway composer wouldn’t realize that sending at an unauthorized copy of a demo recording would be frowned upon.  And even more suspicious is that Katherine McPhee’s character, a 24-year-old who seems well adjusted to New York City and the theatrical scene, would receive a call at 10 o’clock at night telling her to go to the house of the Broadway director she just auditioned for and not figure out he wanted to sleep with her.  But other than that, the characters are well written and serve their functions well.

A large part of this is due to casting, which is spot on.  I particularly enjoyed Debra Messing and Christian Borle as the composing team, and Jack Davenport is deliciously smarmy as the hotshot Broadway director (and I can’t wait to find out why his character and Borle’s hate one another).  Even McPhee, who was probably the biggest question mark as far as acting ability was concerned, is doing a fine job.  Do I want to give her an Emmy?  No, but I also don’t want to yell at her to get off the screen, either. 

I also think the show did an excellent job in handling the biggest concern among theatre lovers prior to the pilot airing.  Most people I know, in typical diva worshipping fashion, seem to be of the opinion that any sane person would cast Megan Hilty on the spot.  I happen to agree that she is probably a more appropriate choice to play Marilyn Monroe, but the pilot of Smash makes a good case for at least seeing what McPhee has to offer in the role.  And honestly, they sold me on the idea of this rivalry with a single line of dialogue: the dismissive “thanks” given to Hilty by the director after her workshop performance of the baseball number.  He clearly doesn’t like Hilty, and honestly, that sort of unfounded bias would be more than enough to hold someone back in this business.

Yet in another way, their rivalry actually is my biggest concern with the series.  If Smash is going to be about the development of a Marilyn Monroe musical, the fictional creative team is going to have to pick their lead relatively early on.  But the pilot sets up the competition between these two actresses as the main conflict for the series, so I’m interested to see what new obstacles they manage to invent while keeping both women in play. 

It also drove me *insane* when I heard that disgusting, Autotune-style mechanical reverb kick in on the FIRST NOTE of McPhee’s rendition of “Beautiful.”  People do not sound like that in real life, and they certainly don’t sound that way when they audition.  If it had kicked in after McPhee went into fantasy-land later in the number, I could have dealt with it, but not right away.  It was the one bad habit from Glee to rear its ugly head, but was thankfully confined to that one performance (Hilty’s vocals sounded gloriously unaltered, which is what happens when you cast actual Broadway talent).

I was also happy to see that unlike Glee, Smash is putting a lot more effort into the “book scenes.”  On the high-school set series, they get so busy singing their pop covers that I often feel like the story is rushed and underdeveloped.  By cutting the number of songs in half, Smash actually had time to begin to develop its large cast of characters and their various problems.  And when the songs did occur, they were for the most part new songs of a very high quality.  And by having the musical at the center of Smash be about a showbiz star, the songs written for the show-within-a-show will be able to reflect the same themes going on in the characters’ lives, which makes them actually work within the context of the TV show.

As Glee continues to be undone by its erratic behavior, the impending graduation of its core characters, and the dramaturgical gymnastic that will be required to keep said characters around for season 4, it’s nice to see Smash come along and take the TV musical into adult territory.  I will certainly be watching, and I hope the rest of America will as well. 

In Defense of Glee

"Don't Rain on My Parade," that shining moment where Glee actually lived up to its potential

There seems to be a growing sentiment among the theatre community that Glee, that Fox show about all the misfit “teenagers” with a predisposition for bursting out into song, has jumped the shark.  I find this turning of public sentiment on a show that just two years ago was the obsession of literally everyone to be both hilarious and a little sad.  Because, dear reader, this sudden swelling of hatred for the show is entirely undeserved.

Now don’t get me wrong.  Glee has major problems.  It is an underwritten, poorly plotted piece of trash TV filled with two-dimensional characters who act in ludicrously unbelievable ways, while singing heavily auto-tuned renditions of songs only tangentially related to the plot.  Whenever there is a storyline that holds actual interest, it is often shoved to the side to make way for yet another musical number or some nonsense about babies.  There are more recurring characters than the writers know what to do with, a problem exacerbated by the constant parade of guest stars eating up valuable screen time that would be better used developing the leads.

But what most people seem to forget/deny is that the show has ALWAYS been this way.  From the very beginning.  Between the six or seven main kids and the half-dozen recurring adults, there have always been more characters than the writers have been able to comfortably handle.  They have always behaved ludicrously, from Coach Sue’s irrational hatred of the Glee club (which, incidentally, was probably the most praised aspect of the show’s first season and even won Jane Lynch an Emmy) to Will’s wife attempting to fake a pregnancy around her freakin’ husband!

The show has also always struggled to incorporate the musical numbers in a way that makes sense.  I distinctly remember an episode where Mercedes was convinced Kurt, the gayest TV character outside of the LOGO network, was actually straight, and when she found out he wasn’t interested in her smashed the window of his SUV while singing “Bust the Window Out Your Car.”  As far as I can tell, this entire plot was concocted to allow her the chance to sing this song, and it came at the expense of making the character look like a complete idiot.

To claim that Glee has suddenly become bad TV is to willfully ignore the fact that it was bad to begin with.  I think the majority of people confused “different” with “good” when the show first premiered, and I’ve suddenly gone from the being the guy arguing the show isn’t that good to arguing its better than people give it credit for.  If you ask me, Glee has remained at about the same quality level as it always was: wildly uneven.  Certain episodes (or segments of episodes) work like gangbusters, and others are so excruciatingly awful you wonder how it ever made it to air. 

So be honest with yourselves.  Glee is bad, and has always been that way.  If you’re a former fan of the show who is now bashing it, you need to fess up to the fact that your former favorite show was never all it was cracked up to be.