Dancin’ Dan here, wishing I could say that I was coming here not to bury Smash, but to praise it. Truly. I have been a huge Smash apologist ever since that (amazingly, awesomely) ridiculous Bollywood number last season, but the show’s two most recent episodes, “The Phenomenon” and “The Transfer”, are just awful. I can't defend them. Any goodwill I had left for the show has gone pretty much completely out the window. Which is all the sadder considering we will soon be laying eyes on the series's final episodes.
SPOILERS AFTER THE JUMP
I admit, even when the show seemingly killed off Kyle (sweet, cute-as-a-button little Kyle) at the end of “The Producers”, I held out hope. Yes, it was a cheap move, but how I felt about that moment would ultimately depend upon what the show did with that event, how the plot and characters moved forward. Unfortunately, it did pretty much everything in the absolute worst way possible.
I held out hope for the show largely because the talent behind Smash is, as pretty much everyone admits, pretty stellar. Give or take a Katharine McPhee here and there, the cast always manages to pull it out when they need to, and the writers and show runners do tend to stick the landing on the really big moments (the Season 1 finale, the opening night of Bombshell on Broadway). In “The Phenomenon”, the performers largely held up their end of the bargain, giving the unbelievably misguided material far more than it deserves.
You see, interspersed throughout the episode are flashbacks to moments with Kyle that ostensibly shed light on how the living characters are feeling about his death. These scenes are pretty good, if often extremely heavy-handed. And the sad thing is, they probably would have worked IF they had been included in the episodes during which they took place. That way, Kyle would have become a more fully-formed character of his own, and we would have been able to make the connections to these scenes ourselves, instead of being hit over the head with them in this episode. Seriously, nearly every scene involves some sort of meta-comment about killing off a character. We get it, Smash! Kyle had to die so that Jimmy could learn something!
The worst part about the decision to kill off Kyle is that this was obviously always the plan for him. Had they actually built Kyle as a character, partly by including those flashback scenes in the episodes during which they would have actually happened, this episode could have worked. It could have been moving. But instead of building Kyle’s character as the season went along, he only existed as a plot contrivance. He existed to die, so that asshole Jimmy could Learn Something, and that is the cheapest kind of storytelling. I’ve often defended Smash’s lapses into cliché and lazy plotting by saying that it’s playing by the traditions and conventions of musical comedy, but this is the type of cliché and lazy plotting that only happens in the WORST musical comedies, if at all.
The stuff not directly related to Kyle’s death is all better, even as a lot of it makes no sense. Ivy and Lee meet with Tom, Eileen, and Agnes to discuss Tony nominations, and someone has set up some of the jankiest-looking boards I have ever seen with the likely nominees for Lead and Featured Actress in a musical. But what world do these people live in? Eileen mentions two rumored/in-development-but-not-anywhere-close-to-Broadway musicals, saying that “Imitation of Life” is closing and “Harold & Maude” is “struggling to maintain the magic it had on the West End”, but Tom mentions the very real (and Tony-nominated in real life) “Drood” and “Pippin” as being contenders (not for Best Musical, since they’re revivals, but for Best Director)! And on the board for Lead Actress, instead of the actresses from "Drood" and "Pippin", joining Ivy are Audra McDonald for “House of Flowers”, Laura Osnes in “Oliver”, Kate Baldwin in “Seesaw” and Jennifer Damiano in “The Beauty Queen”, all of which are fake productions (although Seesaw is a real musical – one that was so awful it will never be revived) … AND “HIT LIST”, despite the fact that at that point it is decidedly NOT going to Broadway!!!!!
But of course, by the end of the episode, Hit List is indeed going to Broadway, under the auspices of Eileen's ex. The idea that Jerry would be the one that ends up taking Hit List to Broadway so as to be in direct competition with Eileen and Bombshell makes every bit of sense (it's just about the only thing in the episode that does). I also loved that Eileen used up her drink-throwing quota earlier in the episode, so that when Jerry dropped that big bombshell, all she could do was glare at him and stomp away.
Of course, the episode really belonged to Bernadette Peters (as all things eventually do). Despite the fact that we only get about ten seconds of her big number from Bombshell (yet another squandered opportunity, show!), she gets all the best lines, including one about how embarrassing it would be to have to beat her own daughter for the Tony (because Ivy was a hit in that Dangerous Liaisons musical, lest we forget!), and this:
Lee: “Sorry we’re late! The line at Starbucks was ATROCIOUS!”
Ivy: “The line was fine – she had to stop to sign autographs, and pose for pictures… she did everything short of bless a baby.”
Lee: “I did that yesterday!”
There were good things here (Two gay characters finally kiss! Jeremy Jordan sells the shit out of his two big numbers!), but the foundation they were all built on was damaged beyond repair. And without a strong foundation, any building will fall. It doesn’t matter how good-looking that building is, it was built on a bad base, and it won’t be able to hold up for long.
The most recent episode, “The Transfer”, is slightly better (because what could be worse?) until the most ridiculous, over-used soap opera twist in history - a surprise pregnancy! - sinks it. There’s plenty of interesting material to be mined from a musical moving from downtown to the Great White Way, but it’s all glossed over at lightning speed so that we can get to the inevitable Showdown At The Tonys in the season series finale. How did the show expand to fit the bigger space? What compromises had to be made artistically? Other than Ana missing a cue because the stage is bigger and some talk as to how she now has to do the trapeze number much higher in the air than before, we don’t really know.
Smash has always been at its best when it focuses on the creation of the art, and “The Transfer” only pays lip service to that, instead choosing to ground itself in soap operatics that are only tangentially related to the making of a Broadway show – or even transferring an Off Broadway show to Broadway. So the chorus girl Derek slept with is suddenly in the show and blackmailing him to get Ana’s part, which she apparently succeeds in doing. This despite the fact that she would have an easier time knocking out bland, dead-eyed Karen, especially since, as Karen (of all people!) points out, Ana is the whole reason the show got any interest at all in the first place, since the New York Times guy loved her performance at the benefit so much.
And I haven’t even gotten to the business with Tom and Julia’s concert (this week in Megan Hilty Is Awesome), and Eileen apparently masterminding leaking their break-up to the press in order to win a Tony, not to mention Derek and Karen's crazy non-relationship, all of which is so unnecessarily convoluted and ridiculous that…
Ugh. Whatever. I can't. I’m sad to see Smash get cancelled. I really am. Even in its worst episodes, the show always looked spectacular, and the cast as a whole (with one or two notable exceptions) was usually able to elevate the often (very) weak material. And the premise is a great one. If the show only had the guts to focus on, you know, THE ART AND COMMERCE OF MAKING A MUSICAL instead of the careless, lazy interpersonal drama, it could have been great. Instead, Season Two has been an overall failure up to this point, despite delivering some major goods in “Opening Night”, which very well might have been the best episode of the entire series.
If only it had ended there.
Grades: “The Phenomenon” – F “The Transfer” – C-