Sneak Peek: NBC’s “Smash” Self-Leaks Its First Episode on Airplanes
You know what America is craving right now, post-recession and during a harrowing election? That’s right: a very self-important drama about New York City gays, Fosse impersonators and their ladies who all love Broadway musicals and like to be mildly catty! That’s why NBC is going big guns on its mid-season spectacular, “Smash,” which premieres a week from today. It’s supposed to redeem their fall season. Ahem. Not even kidding, about the plot: “Former ‘American Idol’ contestant Katharine McPhee stars as struggling actress Karen Carpenter, competing for the leading role in a new musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe.”
Talk about doing it wrong. If only they’d named her Marilyn Monroe, and the musical was based on Karen Carpenter.
Good news: while reviews of the show have been embargoed, even though they’ve circulated DVDs to the New York City elite media, which is, not incidentally, made up of gays and single women who like being catty, any recent boarder of an American Airlines flight has gotten to see the first episode! I caught it Friday night, and boy is it… well it’s… “expensive” seems accurate. (If you’re not flying, you can even watch it on Netflix.)
Maybe it’ll be great? Debra Messing (who actually is given a husband and a family in the show — talk about ways to alienate your single lady demo) and her best gay (presumably; gayness telegraphed by his “chatty hands”) are back in the game with a brassy producer (the getting-divorced character played by an extremely taut Anjelica Huston) with a Big Musical! But they must Make Sacrifices to play the Broadway Game as they begin to cast their Marilyn, working with an Evil Scheming Fosse-alike. What Marilyn will win? Will it be the sassy unfamous one with the bosoms? Or will it be the newcomer with the heart of gold, who wears a dress literally adorned with cherries to her call-back?
Tune in for the second episode to find out which over-produced musical song rendition will win! Or don’t bother. Because it’s not actually campy: “The show slogs through one grave, brow-knitting plotline after another,” is how one brave soul put it.
To be fair, I could go for this show, but the way they treat the music is so dreadful. The songs are Broadway-good (not really a compliment in my book but here we are) but they don’t let anyone sing; everything is so relentlessly over-studio’d and done up Real Big, what’s the point? The current TV audience is used to “American Idol”; we’re not afraid to hear people actually sing, but we’re being really quite protected here. The music here is more like being trapped in an elevator with Celine Dion’s backing tracks blaring at you. That takes away half the fun, and then what are you left with?
