NBC's 'Smash': Review

Even if it weren't based on a more than 30-year-old book by Garson Kanin, the formula for Smash, NBC's new drama about the making of a Broadway musical, would be a familiar one: Writing team (with a little help) gets idea for musical. They manage to get the interest of a producer, who recruits a maverick director for the project. Auditions begin, and two talented women compete for the lead role, which in this case is Marilyn Monroe.

Add some creative tension between the writing duo (Debra Messing and Christian Borle); give the producer (Anjelica Huston) some financial difficulties; and make the director (Jack Davenport) a talented sleaze; add a rivalry between the two actresses (Megan Hilty and Katherine McPhee) and, voila, you've got a by-the-book musical.

Except that midway through Smash's premiere episode comes a number called The National Pastime, in which Marilyn, now in love with Joe DiMaggio, tries to "understand" baseball in a song laced with double-entendres. The song is staged with the razzmatazz that marks the best Broadway numbers, and when Hilty and a group of male dancers perform it, Smash begins to catch fire.

Here's a clip of choreographer Joshua Bergasse talking about the number.

The song was written by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who wrote the musical Hairspray, and they've written other original numbers for Smash (the one that ends the premiere episode, sung by Hilty and McPhee, is pretty good, too). Smash also includes some cover songs, and any time a musical number happens, my resistance to the show breaks down.

Unfortunately, when the music stops, we're back to the self-conscious dialogue and trite situations. Some of it's just the usual exposition we get in pilot episodes, such as when the husband of Messing's character says, "We're trying to adopt a baby!" which is more for our benefit than hers, since she already knows they're trying to adopt a baby. And the early episodes drop so much Marilyn trivia, it's like the writers are trying to redo Monroe's Internet Movie Database entry.

The lascivious director is a familiar type, as are the two actresses competing for the Marilyn role: Hilty's Ivy, a stage vet looking for her first lead part, and McPhee's Karen, a small-town Iowa girl trying to make it on Broadway (why are girls like her always from the Midwest?) There are Monroe parallels here, with Karen coming off like a pre-fame Norma Jean and Ivy as the more fame-savvy Marilyn, but that doesn't stop the characters from being a bit cliched.

To be fair, it's not like Smash is trying to be that original -- this is a show that wears both its heart and its derivativeness on its sleeve. But it could do it with a little more zip to its dialogue and stories. The characters don't banter nearly as well as real theater people do. (Although it's not a musical or about a musical, the Canadian series Slings & Arrows, which aired a few years ago on Sundance Channel and is available on DVD, did a much better job at following the behind-the-scenes frustrations of staging a play.)

NBC sent the first four episodes of Smash for review; the first three adhere pretty closely to formula, but things broaden out a little bit with the fourth episode, written by Brothers and Sisters' David Marshall Grant, who boosts the role of some supporting characters and fleshes out other subplots.

It's tempting to say, "If it gets to the fourth episode, given NBC's problems with the 9 p.m. CT Monday time slot, where the network hasn't had a successful show in years (Harry's Law started to get traction there, but the network quickly began moving it around the schedule).

Smash is up against two established series, Hawaii Five-O and Castle,, but it should benefit both from a heavy promotional campaign (including putting the pilot episode online well before the premiere) and from being scheduled after The Voice, one of the more successful NBC series of recent years. I may have reservations about Smash, and it may not be the smash NBC needs, but it could be a decent addition to the network's lineup.