Debra Messing has joked that her former Will & Grace co-star Eric McCormack could soon be her roommate.

Messing – who is currently starring in Smash – told TV Guide that she’s offered her apartment to McCormack when he moves to New York City in the coming months.

“Eric’s moving to New York this spring to do a Broadway play [The Best Man], so I’ve told him he can have my guest room and we could live together again,” the actress revealed.

McCormack and Messing co-starred as best friends on Will & Grace for eight seasons between 1998 and 2006.

Messing has recently been rumoured to be dating her Smash co-star Will Chase. Smash director Michael Mayer appeared to confirm the romance by saying: “On Broadway, we call it a ‘showmance’. That’s where people meet and fall in love.”

Smash airs Mondays at 10/9c on NBC.

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— In the second episode of the new NBC series “Smash,” a hard-driving Broadway producer played by Anjelica Huston throws a drink in the face of her ex-husband and former business partner at a midtown Manhattan watering hole.

“Would you get out of my booth?” she snarls. “I’m not giving you Bond 45 in the divorce, Jerry!”

Bond 45 is the buzzy restaurant in Times Square where many major Broadway deals go down over oysters and martinis. It’s a place where people bark “Get me Bernie!” into their cellphones, meaning Bernie Telsey, a top theater casting agent. Or “Get me Joe Machota,” the powerful CAA agent. Or where you might find Jordan Roth, the young president of Jujamcyn, a leading Broadway theater owner.

The fact that “Smash” — a series about the creation of a fictional Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe — is awash in these arcane details has generated ripples of excitement among those who toil in the often unforgiving fields of Broadway. Mainstream network attention to what has long been regarded as niche entertainment has aroused hope, pride, curiosity, Internet chatter and deep skepticism in the restaurants, rehearsal halls and offices surrounding New York’s Shubert Alley.

“We were surprised at how small the community is compared to film and television, everybody knows everyone,” says Neil Meron, who, with his longtime business partner Craig Zadan, is the executive producer of the series. The pair recently entered the Broadway arena with the revivals of “Promises, Promises” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” after resuscitating the movie musical (“Chicago,” “Hairspray”) and musicals on television (“Annie,” “Cinderella”).

“We wanted to bring that intimacy to ‘Smash,’” Meron said. “We want the Broadway community to see themselves in this show, literally and figuratively.”

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Scene: A massive converted warehouse somewhere in Brooklyn, late 2011. The lights come up on the cast of an ambitious network drama about the making of a Broadway musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe as they screen the series’ pilot during a catered lunch break. Once the credits roll, so do the waves of applause…

As anyone who’s read the copious critical raves knows, Smash — the most faaabulous show that’s not on Bravo — is all that and an orchestra seat. Produced by Steven Spielberg, created by Emmy nominee Theresa Rebeck (NYPD Blue), loaded with tunes by Hairspray Tony winners Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman and boasting a cast so good you’d think it was on cable, this stage-door soap is either gonna be a knock-’em-dead blockbuster or one of TV’s splashiest misfits.

It’s risky for sure. There’s a reason you don’t see a lot of musical dramedies on the small screen, and unless Rachel Berry winds up in the Big Apple, Smash couldn’t be any less like Glee… something NBC chairman Bob Greenblatt is happy about. “Three years ago, everybody thought putting Glee on was crazy, including the network,” says Greenblatt, amid a swarm of hyped-up chorus types and crew members following the cast screening. Having first developed a “darker” version of the backstage serial while heading up Showtime, Greenblatt is grateful that Fox’s show-choir hit “laid the groundwork for music in a TV show,” even while distancing Smash from any comparisons. “Up until Glee, it had been a spotty record for musicals,” he says. “We take our hats off to them. We’re different shows that are going to be lumped together because we’re the only two musicals, but we are very different.”

So different, in fact, that Smash might be too “inside baseball” for the average viewer, which is why the producers have packed it with something for everyone. “If you love theater, you’ll love the show,” says executive producer Neil Meron (a producer of Oscar winner Chicago). “If you have no interest in theater… well, their lives are like everybody else’s, so we’ll be dealing with their parents, boyfriends, girlfriends, their families.” Adds Rebeck, “It’s more character-driven” with “great soap elements” aplenty. “It’s a very complicated world in terms of the class structure,” she says. “It’s very much like Upstairs/Downstairs, except there’s not a mansion; it’s a [theater].”

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An actress playing Marilyn Monroeis twirling among a group of lithe dancers when four of them grab electric fans, angle them just-so toward the ceiling and balloon her skirt, re-creating the blonde bombshell’s iconic pose.

The scene is her breakup with Joe DiMaggio, set to Lexington and 52nd St., one of a number of original songs written for NBC’s Smash (Monday, 10 ET/PT). Or rather, for Marilyn: The Musical, a show-within-a-TV-show taking shape in a Brooklyn TV studio decked out as an austere rehearsal space.

It’s part of a comeback of sorts for Monroe, nearly 50 years after her death: Michelle Williams’ portrayal in My Life With Marilyn won her a third Oscar nomination last week, and Fragments, a collection of her poetry and notes, was published in 2010.

“There’s something about her at the core that everyone can identify with,” says Megan Hilty, a Broadway actress who plays one of two Smash characters vying for the role. “Aside from the glamour, it was that primal animalistic energy she had.”

But it’s also a potential comeback for fourth-place (and nearly hitless) NBC, which is pouring tens of millions of dollars into programming chief Bob Greenblatt’s biggest bet. “It’s a world that is inherently dramatic and visually exciting,” he says, and a departure from the network’s generic cop and lawyer shows, which have mostly tanked. “If it doesn’t work, we’re not going to fall apart. But it’s a big hope that it can land and start to turn the tide around for us. It’s the biggest, buzziest, loudest, highest-concept thing we have.”

And the most heavily marketed, with ubiquitous ads, promos in Sunday’s Super Bowl, free early downloads and last week’s gala premiere at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There’s even (perhaps premature) talk of a real Marilyn musical on Broadway.

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