Smash

Trailer:



Original Songs:




The pilot episode is everywhere at the moment as a preview. Otherwise it premieres the day after the SuperBowl. I checked it out out of curiosity after reading Spielberg was actually rather hands on in this and not just slapping his name on it and to be honest I was really, really impressed. Bar the silly speech from the writers assistant it was well acted, well written, well shot, well scored (the original songs are pretty damn good, especially for a tv show schedule) and intriguing. And it had Katherine McPhee in a skin tight dress.

Also no or little to no autotune.

Pretty positive write up from the New York Times:

Quote :

Broadway’s Big Prime-Time Moment
By PATRICK HEALY

DECADES before his elaborate film productions like “E.T.” and “Saving Private Ryan,” Steven Spielberg cut his teeth as a high school stage manager in Phoenix, feeding lines to forgetful actors in “Guys and Dolls” and trying to keep the members of a large “Brigadoon” cast from turning into bumper cars. Backstage drama provided the first adrenaline rush of his career, he said, and always struck him as good material. So much so that, a few years ago, Mr. Spielberg began shopping around a television series set on Broadway, but he met with rejection from HBO (where he made “Band of Brothers”) and the broadcast networks.

“There was skepticism,” he recalled in an interview, “that viewers would care about the making of a Broadway show.”

Then he found a fellow traveler in Robert Greenblatt, then the president for entertainment at Showtime. As a teenager Mr. Greenblatt had been a props assistant in Illinois community theater. In 2009 he achieved his dream of producing a Broadway musical, “9 to 5,” while juggling his job at Showtime. The musical was a flop, closing after five months, but disappointment soon turned to deliverance. Embracing Mr. Spielberg’s idea, Mr. Greenblatt had a second chance to prove that he could draw a big audience to Broadway, even if it was on television.

The result is “Smash,” a prime-time soap starring Debra Messing as the lyricist of a new musical about Marilyn Monroe, Anjelica Huston as a Broadway producer, and scores of theater actors playing, well, themselves. What began as a pitch for a dark-themed Showtime series has become a PG-rated show beginning Feb. 6 on NBC, where Mr. Greenblatt is now chairman of its entertainment division.

“Smash” carries huge stakes for both NBC and Mr. Greenblatt. “We’re in a pretty bad situation,” he said of NBC’s last place among the networks. “We desperately need something to catch fire, and we hope this is it.” For Broadway, nothing less than pride is on the line.

For years amateur singers on reality shows, and more recently the high school choir characters on the Fox series “Glee,” have passed for musical theater talent without doing justice to the sweat, training and tears seen in audition rooms across New York. “Smash” is the theater capital’s best shot to reveal itself to the rest of America. Mr. Greenblatt and the Broadway veterans on the show’s creative team have emphasized authenticity above all else, transplanting their own DNA into the characters and plotlines, and even hiring real-life insiders like the producer Emanuel Azenberg and the theater owner Jordan Roth to play themselves.

Jaime Cepero, a 26-year-old television newcomer who plays an ambitious personal assistant on “Smash,” said he felt that he was representing young theater actors whose skills largely go unseen, as his once did. “You watch ‘American Idol,’ ” he said, “and the judges say to someone who isn’t a good singer, ‘Well, you could still be on Broadway.’ Now we’re going to give the respect back to the Broadway community that it deserves.”

The question, to echo those who dared to say no to Mr. Spielberg, is whether viewers will care enough about the hopes and dreams, the backstabbing and “showmances,” of these Broadway babies to tune in week after week. The producers of “Smash” are hoping for the next great workplace drama; their model, they said repeatedly in interviews, is an earlier NBC series, “The West Wing.” On that show the writer Aaron Sorkin injected smart dialogue and absorbing melodrama into the hallway banter and political crises facing a fictional White House. “Smash” has its own knowing touches — references to “Bernie” (the influential casting director Bernie Telsey) and “George” (the powerful theater agent George Lane) — and humanizing story lines, particularly the competition for the role of Marilyn between two young hoofers, played by Katharine McPhee (best known from “American Idol”) and Megan Hilty (who starred in “Wicked” and “9 to 5” on Broadway).

Perhaps more resonant in the era of “the 99 percent,” “Smash” is also about class, showing its actors working as waiters and struggling to pay bills, while Ms. Huston’s grande dame tosses drinks in the face of her cheating husband, even as she herself is trying to raise money for the Monroe musical. “Upstairs, Downstairs,” the 1970s British series about servants and their masters in a London town house, is a touchstone for the creator and head writer of “Smash,” Theresa Rebeck, a frequently produced playwright (her comedy “Seminar” is now on Broadway) and an alumna of the writing staffs of other serials.

“Instead of the mansion, we have a musical,” Ms. Rebeck said of the story architecture in the two shows. Or, as Mr. Spielberg, an executive producer of “Smash,” put it, “There’s thrilling, fun mystery in how Broadway creates such wonderful illusions and imagery in the limited space of a stage. That’s a rich story.”

Showtime’s plans for “Smash” never got far, but the cable version was conceived as an “Entourage”-like insider’s account of Broadway, said the producer Craig Zadan, full of edge (sex, nudity and profanity) and bitterness (hopes dashed more than realized). Those slices of Broadway certainly exist, and were reportedly the hallmarks of a recent HBO pilot about a self-destructive Broadway composer, “The Miraculous Year.” Mr. Spielberg said HBO cited that pilot as a reason for passing on his idea; the cable network ultimately rejected the show, which proved lucky for “Smash.”

“If ‘Miraculous Year’ was flourishing on HBO right now, we would not have done our show,” said Mr. Zadan, who, with his business partner, Neil Meron, is a producer of musicals on screen (“Chicago”) and Broadway (“How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”). “There’s no way in this market you could do two series about theater.”

Of course one such series already exists — “Glee” — even it has been up and down in the ratings lately and even if theater is often a tangential aspect. The creators of “Smash,” while thanking “Glee” for opening the door to television musicals after flops like “Cop Rock” and “Viva Laughlin,” were quick to draw distinctions between the two shows. Chiefly, the teenagers on “Glee” sing pop songs and show tunes; the theater pros on “Smash” perform a couple of covers each episode too, but they also sing numbers that have been newly written for Monroe, Joe DiMaggio and others in the show within the show. The Broadway songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who won Tony Awards for “Hairspray,” have been creating the numbers at breakneck speed for the original, two-act musical about Monroe — which Mr. Spielberg fantasizes about producing on the real Broadway if “Smash” is a hit.

“We’re writing a genuine musical, with all the complications that entails for the characters and for us,” said Mr. Wittman, who first proposed that the “Smash” musical be about Monroe, given her inherent glamour and drama and widespread recognition. “These aren’t ‘Glee’ numbers, singing standards in a classroom.”

Mr. Zadan said he would be delighted if “Smash” drew ratings as high as “Glee’s” (in the neighborhood of seven million viewers), but he and his partners are also hoping to copy that show’s success beyond North American viewership. “Smash” has deals in place with Columbia Records for a soundtrack and singles to be sold on iTunes, while NBC and DreamWorks (Mr. Spielberg’s home) have already sold the show’s entire 15-episode first season to several international television broadcasters.

The producers are sparing no expense to try to make “Smash” a moneymaking franchise. Recently a block of Times Square looked like a studio lot for a major motion picture, not a network soap, as Ms. Hilty and Ms. McPhee were surrounded by cameras and joined by scores of extras. While most of the Monroe sequences are taped at an old vaudeville theater on Staten Island, the bulk of “Smash” is made in a cavernous converted warehouse near the East River in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. Mr. Greenblatt said the “Smash” pilot cost about $7.5 million, which he described as normal for a one-hour drama, while the episode costs are slightly above average. Those expenses are allayed by New York City tax credits, which he called “essential for us to avoid faking New York on an L.A. lot.”

If the Brooklyn sets evoke Broadway to the smallest detail — like the fake Playbills in the characters’ dressing rooms — the verisimilitude reaches “Twilight Zone” levels when listening to theater people describe playing theater people. “Smash” could end up challenging “Law & Order” for the title of Broadway’s top temp agency, and actors are salivating, if recent packed screenings of the “Smash” pilot for Broadway casts are a measure. (The screenings drew standing ovations.)

Ms. Messing, an Emmy winner for “Will & Grace” who has performed Off Broadway, described plumbing Mr. Wittman’s rhyming dictionary for her character’s work as a lyricist. Christian Borle, a Tony-nominated actor in the “Legally Blonde” musical, who plays the Monroe composer in “Smash,” practiced crouching the other day to mimic the posture of Mr. Shaiman, the real composer of “Smash.” Mr. Borle recently opted not to reprise a starring role in the play “Peter and the Starcatcher” if it moves to Broadway from Off Broadway this spring.

“I chose theater on television over theater in theater,” he said.

Ms. Hilty, sitting in the dressing room of her character, Ivy, that she tricked out to match her own past ones, laughed heartily over the casting of her Broadway idol, Bernadette Peters, as Ivy’s mother. A subplot involving Ivy sleeping with a major player on the Monroe musical also reminded Ms. Hilty of the usual backstage gossip.

“The Broadway community is a tight little dysfunctional family — dysfunctional because it’s a family that has sex with each other,” Ms. Hilty said. The incestuousness even extends to Monroe’s story: There has already been a Broadway musical about her life (a flop that ran seven weeks in 1983).

The songwriting characters of Mr. Borle and Ms. Messing, meanwhile, were modeled on Ms. Rebeck’s working relationship with the Broadway director Michael Mayer, a consulting producer and director on “Smash.” “He and I basically share a brain,” Ms. Rebeck said.

Only a few theater credits are on Ms. Huston’s résumé — “stage work terrifies me,” she said — yet she held her own in a scene with Mr. Azenberg, best known for producing many Neil Simon plays. He and Ms. Huston talked off camera about the playwright Tom Stoppard, then shot a scene in which Mr. Azenberg was more ruthless than he actually is.

Mr. Azenberg said he had been tickled, at the age of 77, to audition for the role of himself, but that he came away from the “Smash” experience with admiration for the creators’ determination to get Broadway right.

“I always thought Broadway made for good drama, in every sense, and it was nice to learn that Spielberg thought the same,” he said. “It’d be nice to discover, after all these years putting on shows, that America thinks so too.”

Yeah... well that sizzling pilot turned into a bit of a wet fart. Great songs though.

Vesper wrote:

And it had Katherine McPhee in a skin tight dress.

+1

Still not gonna watch it though.

You shouldn't. SMASH is a complete waste of time.

Harmsway wrote:

You shouldn't. SMASH is a complete waste of time.

Agree. I'm usually patient with tv shows, especially on network, but 5 episodes is enough time to get your shit together. SMASH never needed to be an accurate portrayal of behind-the-scenes Broadway, but the thing is it's not even a half-way decent tv show. In fact it's a pretty fucking terrible tv show.

I like the original musical numbers. I'm no expert on music but I like them, they're catchy, but I don't see how they're supposed to piece together to form a musical within the show (hey, a ballad and four uptempo swing numbers! We have a musical!) and between the god awful covers and the Brenda-Hampton style writing, a couple of catchy tunes and a reasonably talented cast aren't enough to save it.

Rebeck might have a good work ethic but the output isn't up to scratch.

It's a shame because I thought the pilot at least had potential for a decent series.

Yeah, I watched the first season. It's not an accurate depiction of behind-the-scenes and the characters are characters. They don't feel real. Limited character development and predictable, but I'll cave and say that it kept me watching. It's all very light-hearted and fluffy - nothing to be taken seriously but in a way it was oddly inspiring to watch as an actor. I suppose that out of all its goofiness, and from my experience within the industry,many actors who are trying to climb the ranks and book roles actually come together. They don't get all snappy and superficial - they become just as ecstatic as you are when you achieve something. It's a very pay-it-forward community and well, despite Ivy's passion, it was very hard to relate...

Or maybe I just mingle with especially generous people!

It had moments that were really good. It also had moments that were really, truly, unspeakably awful. The last twenty minutes or so of the finale were great television (the first twenty and 85% of the rest of the season... ah, the less said the better )

Never Give All The Heart sure is a nice song though. Though more credit is owed to Yeats than Shaiman/Wittman.