Picture it: Fall 2011. NBC is promoting its latest hour long drama. But this one is unique. It's not about cops or lawyers or doctors. It's not about high school or families. It actually has an interesting premise, one that no one on network TV has done before: the backstage process of putting together a big-time Broadway musical about one of Hollywood's most enduring icons, the incomparable Marilyn Monroe. It promised to be an adult, sophisticated workplace drama centered on two equally talented rival actresses.
Smash premiered to solid ratings and glowing reviews. But the ratings slowly declined each week, finally making Smash one of the lowest rated shows on network TV. And the reviews too ridiculed Smash. Just yesterday, NBC decided to send Smash to the Saturday night death slot to finish out its second season.
What happened?
Well, a lot of things. And all those things combined together made for such an embarrassing disaster for NBC, which paid $4 million/episode and promoted the hell out of Smash. But there are five primary reasons for Smash's failure:
1. Smash became a star vehicle instead of an ensemble piece.
Smash has an incredible cast including Oscar winner Anjelica Huston, Emmy winner Debra Messing, Tony winner Christian Borle, Broadway darling Megan Hilty, British actor Jack Davenport and American Idol runner-up Katharine McPhee. And it has the premise and character setups to be a strong ensemble. Huston as the producer, Messing and Borle as the writers, Davenport as the director and McPhee and Hilty as the up and coming starlets.
But somewhere during the development and during the writing process, the crew behind Smash decided that McPhee's Karen Cartwright would be the lead and everyone else would be supporting her. That was a huge disservice to the show since ingenues are rarely ever interesting enough to hang your proverbial hat on. But the producers kept shoving Karen down our throats.
Because Karen is a mid-20s young woman, the producers thought that her career isn't enough to attract a female audience. She must also go through tons of boyfriend issues. The audience signed up for an insider's look at Broadway and instead got a show where a struggling actress has to deal with her political aide boyfriend's sexy co-worker. And so the audience started to leave.
2. The star of Smash cannot act convincingly, let alone carry the entire show.
Focusing on Karen may not have been such a bad choice if Katharine McPhee were a compelling actress in her own right. But she is so woefully bad, giving out robotic line readings and exuding zero screen charisma. Karen herself isn't even a compelling character. The writers made Karen the Be-All-End-All of musical theatre. They simply waved away McPhee's faults by desperately claiming that Karen has some kind of indescribable, inexplicable X factor which made her a better choice to play Marilyn. But that wasn't what was being seen onscreen. McPhee is a very beautiful girl and she has a lovely voice. But she's just not good as an actress nor does she have a voice appropriate for the Broadway stage.
Audiences don't like to be told what to think. But because Smash kept handing everything to Karen on a silver platter without her earning it, it started to lose credibility. And when the show started to compare Karen to Megan Hilty's Ivy, it became clear that Hilty had the chops to be a credible Broadway star (which she is in real life). Obviously that couldn't happen so Ivy was depicted as a villain and put through some embarrassing plots (like when she got high off prescription drugs and made a fool of herself onstage).
The "Karen Problem" became so bad that now whenever Karen does anything, it can only be explained by the Magical Unicorn Blood that runs through her veins. The show has not given the audience any other reason to believe she's capable of doing anything on her own merit. She refuses to learn the way Broadway works (which cheats the audience out of learning that too). She just now in the last two episodes (like 20+ episodes into Smash's run) mentioned taking acting and singing lessons. And the reason she was ultimately cast as Marilyn as opposed to the more talented, more experienced, more shapely Ivy? The director had visions of her as Marilyn. She didn't earn it. The director just had visions of her. I mean, what is that??
3. The real stars of Smash got saddled with meaningless and poorly written plots.
Let's be real here, the majority of the TV audience doesn't care or know much about Broadway theatre. So Smash really had to bank on the two most well-known actors in the cast: Debra Messing and Anjelica Huston. Both ladies unfortunately also got saddled with plots that are both inane and insulting. Like we saw with Karen, the writers assumed that women only want to watch women characters in relationship drama. So instead of seeing how a female writer and a female producer try to make it in a male-dominated business, we saw Messing character Julia's affair with one of the actors or Huston character Eileen gei a shady bartender boyfriend.
Relationship drama is fine. I enjoy it when done well on the right show. But on Smash, it just didn't work. The problem was that Smash had much better material to work with. The initial audience tuned in to see backstage drama. So why focus on relationships? That stuff has been done before on better shows. I guess when the audience realized that the actors they tuned in to see weren't being given anything exciting or unique to do, they tuned out. And that's a shame because both Messing and Huston are inherently likable and watchable and their performances always remained strong even when the story failed them.
4. Smash succumbed to the "Glee Model of Musical Television."
Because Glee is a success both in the ratings and on the iTunes charts, producers of TV musicals (which really just includes Smash, Glee and ABC's Nashville) are all trying to maintain crossover success with iTunes. And that's fine. More downloads, more profits, more name recognition, more watchers. But who buys singles on iTunes? Young people, who were not the supposed audience for Smash. But in order to get more sales on iTunes, Smash started featuring its characters, namely Karen, singing known pop songs in ridiculous, implausible situations like while bowling or in Times Square.
Obviously, because the show was about musical theatre, song and dance numbers were expected. But I was hoping that the songs would be within the context of the Broadway stage, not just because they want to sell more songs on iTunes. I imagine that the producers wanted a wide range of songs, not just the traditional Broadway stuff for the Marilyn musical. And they sort of achieved that with the 2nd season plot of "Hit List," which is a more pop-based musical. But still Smash eventually started catering to the iTunes audience, which sacrificed some of its creative integrity and believability.
5. Smash became aware of its problems but then didn't fix any of them.
During the 8 month hiatus between seasons 1 and 2, Smash received a lot of negative press. It became infamous for beginning the "hate-watching" phenomenon (which wasn't really as big a phenomenon as the media made it out to be). Then creator Theresa Rebeck was fired and new showrunner Joshua Safran started doing press about how the show was going through a creative reevaluation and that things will be different. The big joke was that the first thing they changed was that Messing's wardrobe would consist of fewer scarves.
But that turned out to be the only big change. Sure, Safran got rid of the show's most troublesome characters but he replaced them with ones even more insufferable (like Jeremy Jordan's troubled-bordering-on-abusive-and-coke-addicted songwriter or Daniel Sunjata's know-it-all script doctor). The season 2 premiere began with Karen receiving rave reviews from the Boston tryout performances. Ivy was still being punished for being better.
But even more annoying was that the show would mention these issues with a wink. For example, money-minded producer Jerry says that Karen isn't good enough to headline a show without eye-popping visuals or Ivy, fired from the Marilyn show and cast in a Dangerous Liaisons musical, has her big song cut for a while because she's better than the star. It's like the Smash producers can't see the forest for the trees. Yeah, Messing looks better onscreen but her character is still circling around an interesting storyline without engaging with it.
These to me are the five major reasons why Smash devolved from a prestige project to an embarrassing failure. Hopefully, in a few years, another network will try again the backstage drama and do it with a little more class and self-awareness. Now that Smash has been relegated to a Saturday time-slot, it will die a a slow death. Unfortunately, its legacy will live on as a "what not to do" tutorial for future television writers and producers.
