Last time: Uma’s out, and Dev slept with Ivy but didn’t tell Karen and they’re now kind of engaged except that the ring is mistakenly in Ivy’s room. EWPS.
The first season of Smash went out not with a bang, but with a whimper, a sigh, a big old “ugh, of course,” and a gag.
Who will it be? Will Karen or Ivy get to play Marilyn? THE SUSPENSE IS KILLING US. Except it isn’t: we all know it will be Karen. There is no question. From the very first episode, people who see Karen fall all over themselves to share her special unique snowflakey talent and talk about how freaking great she is, even though the audience doesn’t get it. Look, she’s got a good voice. It’s not a Broadway voice, but it’s certainly more than passable. She’s very pretty. But she’s not much of an actress, she’s a passable dancer (though it never looks natural or effortless; you can always see her trying really REALLY hard), and she has NO stage presence. The acting and dancing could be ignored; the stage presence problem won’t go away.
Oh, hey! Derek announced that it’s Karen after rifling through a bunch of Marilyn costumes and picturing each girl wearing each one. He picks Karen after finding that purple dress that he hallucinated her wearing a few weeks ago. Whatever.
They have less than 12 hours to refit all the costumes, and run the show. Karen doesn’t know all the choreography, doesn’t know all the lyrics (including some recent changes), doesn’t know all the staging. She has to practice all the costume changes and she’s awfully slow at much of it. BUT. In her defense, when she sang the song about wolves loving to howl (aahhh ooooooh), she looked great. From a distance, mostly. But that was the first time I’ve ever seen her pulling off Marilyn. And her skintone is still totally wrong with that wig.
But then there’s a bit of a coup. Everybody but Derek thinks Karen can’t pull it off. Ellis demands that Ivy be in, and announces, TADAA! that he is the one who put peanuts in Uma’s smoothy to save the show by getting rid of Uma. He demands more producer work. Eileen fires him. He says, “of course, you realize… this means WAR!” and she’s all “meh, whatever, go away.” Speaking of useless characters who won’t go away, Eileen’s ex is in town to watch the show for some reason and he wants in on producing too? Whatever.
Eileen, Tom, and Julia really don’t think Karen can do it. Eileen talks to Derek, and Karen overhears. And then she heads backstage where Ivy pops out the engagement ring and hands it to her, telling her all she needs to know. Karen confirms with Dev. She ditches him to head backstage, but then loses her shit by ripping off her wig and disappearing. Nobody can find her until Derek follows a trail of Marilyn artifacts (shoes, dress, mole) to Karen, hiding behind the costume rack. It sure seemed like it took hours to get there. And, in the meantime, because they couldn’t find Karen, Ivy Marilyn’d up just in time for Karen to get back on stage and Ivy to have to un-Marilyn herself. Again. But before she can get out of the Marilyn drag, Bernadette Freaking Peters showed up to cheer Ivy on for making it!
Oh, one other thing I liked about Karen last night? When Ivy told her about Dev, and then tried to console her with some sort of Marilyn bullshit about how Dev is a good conservative marrying-type guy just like Joe DiMaggio, Karen stopped her and said, “I am not Marilyn. This is about ME not her. We are not the same person!” and all the people who watch Smash said “SERIOUSLY IT IS MORE THAN ABOUT DAMN TIME.”
So then the show went on. Tom and Julia figured out their last scene. As the show was starting, they made the cameras follow “Anonymous Girl Playing Marilyn” around up the stairs, even though it was already announced that Karen was Marilyn and we’ve already seen her being Marilyn all day… whatever. And guess what? It was still Karen.
The new ending involved an empty stage with Marilyn in a sparkly dress and in the spotlight (after the same suicide scene that bombed two weeks ago). She sang a quite beautiful song about begging people not to forget her while the ensemble girls popped up individually in Marilyn drag behind her at times, and then it ended with a big ass pic of Marilyn Herself on a scrim behind the stage. Karen sang it quite well, but, again. The stage presence thing. She can pull off being surrounded by a bunch of dancers, but when she’s standing there alone on stage, she’s just… standing there. And that’s not enough.
Oh, and the really awful, really predictable, horrible stuff that happened (other than Karen getting the role, that is)?
Julia’s knocked up.
Ivy’s overdosing backstage.
Seriously.
_____________________________________
Rumor has it that Smash is getting TOTALLY reworked for next season. It will pop up mid-season again, which gives the new showrunner time to create a new vision or something. It appears that the entire audience has the exact same gripes I do (Karen isn’t charismatic but they won’t stop pushing it, Julia’s family is boring, Ellis is randomly evil and nobody cares, random singalongs at bars and karaoke and bowling alleys and in Times Square suck and are clearly there to sell iTunes singles but the good music is the stuff for Bombshell, etc) and it appears that they show will be addressing a good number of these gripes, if not all. Cutting way back on the cast, which is far too big. We’ll see.
The show has the makings of something fantastic. It just keeps getting bogged down by itself and is so dang tonedeaf to think that it’s doing things right? Sheesh. Here’s hoping next season ends up being the great show this thing started off with the promise of.
Until all these shenanigans are over, FuzzyButt will be tucked under a blanket on the couch, thankyouverymuch. She requests occasional bathroom breaks and frequent bellyrubs. She also requests that those goddamned helicopters GO AWAY AND SHUT UP, but she doubts that they will listen to her.
