THOUGHTS UPON THE PREMIERE OF SMASH
As a former theater geek, by all rights Smash should have been my favorite TV show ever. Fame, of course, is the one movie certain to reduce me to a blubbering jello every time I watch it. I went into Smash tonight with maybe 20 percent of me hoping that it would be. Now that the premiere is over, there is zero percent of me that thinks it will be my favorite show of all time. And only about 35 percent of me believes that I’ll still be watching it in two months.
The thing about doing a modern backstage piece that you have to get right is that everyone involved in the theater is deeply mentally ill - in a way that is often very intoxicating and exciting - and every person in theater also channels more desperation and fear into every one of their bodies at any moment than the average person will ever know in their lifetime. If you are capturing the world of the stage and you don’t capture that heady combination of insanity and desperation, then you really are just painting around the edges
I felt no desperation at all in the characters in Smash. A few of them mentioned that they were desperate or were given reasons to be desperate but the desperation just could not survive in a show that had a very uptown feeling to it. Everyone wants the part and wants the show to do well, but no one’s very life is depending on it, which is pretty much how show people act all the time.
And no one at all was mentally ill. If you don’t get the insanity, you miss the whole thing. There is a study somewhere in fact that stage actors suffer from the highest incidence of mental illness of all artists, except for poets. (The number was something like 87 percent of actors are mentally ill). The characters in Smash were either neurotic jerks or starry eyed dreamers but none were insane.
But maybe Smash is right and Broadway has changed since my image of it. The Fame days were a golden era of Broadway backstage movies. My friend Kate Aurthur dubbed it the Evita-Bus genre, when every film in New York was studded with shots of city buses adorned with Patti Lupone placards. Stretching from The Goodbye Girl to Author, Author, the New Yorkers pictured in these movies were uncouth, unhinged and very desperate all the time. Smash on the other hand has a very upscale, safe, polished feel to it. Debra Messing at home with her nagging husband seemed like they were in an episode of 30-something.
Maybe this is Broadway today, or maybe this is just another case of as gritty as a major network could let the show be, and somewhere out there in the Universe is a much better version of this that ran on Showtime. But I’ll tell you; 2012 is the year of my independence from “Good for a Major Network. In a zillion channel, iTunes universe, there is no reason to give the networks bonus points for trying anymore. If they can’t entertain me as well as FX, I’ve got a remote control and I’m not afraid to use it. I’m through with being supportive of The Good Wife just because it’s better than CSI:Miami. Keep up or pack it in, people. The grace period is over.
All that said, congratulations to Katharine McPhee, my all time 5th or 6th favorite American Idol.
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