by Megan Bailey, Staff Writer

Let me set the scene. It’s 2011, Glee is in its heyday, and Ryan Murphy has decided to tackle original music in the show. At first, the songs are humorous. Rachel’s song about her headband (“you're my headband, wrapped right around my melon”), Mercedes’s song using her catchphrase, “Hell to the No,” Santana’s song about Sam (“Trouty Mouth”), and so on.

But then, as the second season wore on, New Directions performed some actually kind of good songs in competition. Rachel sings “Get It Right,” and the group does “Loser Like Me” at regionals. And in the season two finale, they perform two more original songs at Nationals. With Glee, Ryan Murphy had set off an acapella group craze, and now he was kicking off a musical TV show trend as well.

Enter Smash. Premiering in 2012, it’s primed to be, well, a smash. Spielberg came on as a producer, and the show got a lot of attention… at first. The show was created and developed by Theresa Rebeck, who also showran the first season. Due to issues behind the scenes, the show shifted hands for the second season, when Joshua Safran took over.

The show follows Karen (Katharine McPhee) and Ivy (Megan Hilty), who are in contention to play Marilyn Monroe on Broadway. We also see the creation of the musical, titled Bombshell, as Julia (Debra Messing) and Tom (Christian Borle) write the music/lyrics and the book (essentially the script other than the songs) for the show. There’s also Eileen (Anjelica Houston), the producer, and Derek (Jack Davenport), the director and choreographer of Bombshell.

For the first season, we exclusively follow the creation of Bombshell and all its trials and tribulations to get to the stage. With Smash’s combination of Broadway stars (Megan Hilty, Christian Borle, Brian d’Arcy James) and famous screen actors (Anjelica Houston, Uma Thurman), along with the support of Spielberg, this could have been a slam dunk. But despite getting a second season renewal, the show was left to languish and ended up changing time slots twice in the second season, before it got canceled.

I’m technically breaking my own rules by including Smash in this project, since it does feature some cover songs, like Katharine McPhee’s truly insane “Redneck Woman” performance. But I think this show is an important steppingstone to the return of shows with all original music. And I like the songs written for Smash quite a bit.

The Smash music slaps hard thanks to Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, who wrote the music for the Bombshell musical. Prior to Smash, they’d written the music and lyrics for the musical adaptations of Hairspray and Catch Me if You Can. They know how to write a knock-out song for a stage show.

Pretty much every episode featured at least one song from Bombshell and a cover song, with the Marilyn songs being worked on in rehearsals and the original song coming up outside of the workplace. For instance, in the episode about Karen and Ivy waiting for callbacks, Karen imagines singing “Call Me” by Blondie to the producers of Bombshell. Clever, right?

The storylines varied from fun to campy, compelling to truly unbelievable. The worst part of the show, to me, is when Derek is accused of sexual harassment, and everyone comforts him about it. Even in 2014, this is a bit off the wall. Of course, the storyline is resolved with him being the wronged party but taking the fall in order to save the show, which was truly nonsensical. But that’s Smash for you!

In the second season, Karen ends up leaving Bombshell and starts working on a new musical, Hit List. The songs for that show were written by a collection of writers, including Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who would go on to write the music and lyrics for Dear Evan Hansen and The Greatest Showman, as well as lyrics for La La Land. I found this new musical kind of a nuisance because I cared way more about Bombshell. But some of the music is very popular with viewers, so what do I know?

Over the course of the show, we see twenty-two songs for Bombshell and fifteen for Hit List, a really impressive output for a show like this. There are a lot of bangers in this, which means that the music has lived on after the show was canceled. Many, many Broadway singers have done Smash songs in other performances, including Bonnie Milligan (who won a Tony this year for her role in Kimberly Akimbo) at 54 Below and Reneé Rapp at BroadwayCon.

In 2015, the Smash cast reunited to do a one-night-only performance of songs from the TV show on Broadway. They sold out the Minskoff Theater on a Monday night, which led to the announcement that the producers intended to take Smash to Broadway for real. A similar performance for Hit List took place in 2013, but that didn’t lead to any further development on that show.

Earlier this month, I got to attend the open rehearsal for Smash, pitched as a “comedy about a musical.” The performance featured a good number of songs from the TV show—including most of my favorites, which was nice! And it still followed the creation of a Marilyn Monroe musical, just with a different amalgamation of characters. The show takes some big swings, and it goes to some lengths to differentiate itself from the show. I think it’s a really interesting take on the material from the TV show, and I hope it makes it to Broadway in the 2024-25 season, as expected.

Overall, Smash is an interesting steppingstone in the musical TV show landscape. Not quite a jukebox musical or a fully original work, it straddles the line and shows you the strengths (and weaknesses) in both types of shows. The original songs in Smash could be really, really great, but there were some duds. And while popular music can be fun, some of the song choices were deeply weird. But just try to tell me “Let Me Be Your Star” isn’t a hit!

Smash was not exactly the runaway hit of the 2014 season the way it was intended, but it kept the musical TV show trend moving. Next month, we’ll talk about Nashville, a much more successful musical TV show that, unlike Smash, probably outstayed its welcome.