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Television Works > Smash (2011) > Season 1 > On Set – February 2nd, 2012

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].”

In what appears to be an effort to spice up the niche subject matter, expect theatrics and lots of sexy twists: In addition to the ongoing battle for the role of Marilyn, there will be bed-hopping, a drug-fueled decline, a brutal divorce case, an All About Eve-ish betrayal, love triangles, an original song and cameo by One Republic’s Ryan Tedder, and (holy stunt casting!) a Nick Jonas guest appearance. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that all of this is acted out, sung or kick-ball-changed by a cast riddled with award winners and gifted Broadway talent.

“As soon as I finished reading the pilot, I called my agent and said I have to be a part of this,” remembers Debra Messing, whose harried lyricist, Julia Houston, is dealing with the birthing pains of a new musical, a pending adoption with her frustrated hubby (Brian D’Arcy James) and the Episode 3 return of her former lover (Will Chase), who scores the role of Joe DiMaggio. “I loved every character. I loved the world,” effuses Messing. “And then to do it in New York? It’s shot so beautifully that it feels like a love letter to the city.”

Christian Borle (Legally Blonde: The Musical), whose charm as Julia’s sardonic composing partner, Tom Levitt, could fill a Broadway theater, shares her excitement for the show’s risk-taking when it comes to presenting audiences with an industry rarely explored on TV. “They got the details right,” raves the Tony nominee. “As glamorous and goosebump-inducing as a lot of the numbers are, the backstage stuff shows a lot of the warts of what you go through.”

“I was like, ‘Damn, that doesn’t read like a TV show’… in a good way,” echoes Jack Davenport, set to send hearts swooning as Derek Wills, the 14-carat bastard of a director who beds one of his stars early on. “The scripts are fantastic.”

Rebeck’s writing also swayed Oscar winner Anjelica Huston (Prizzi’s Honor) to sign on for her first-ever series-regular role. “The quality of the material, Theresa is responsible for that,” says Huston, kicking back in diva-caliber Louboutins while stand-ins work out a rehearsal-room powwow between her scene-stealing, soon-­to-be-divorced producer Eileen Rand and a group of potential Marilyn investors. “And just in terms of the kind of work that one can do for a series, particularly a beautifully written one like this, it’s great,” she says, clearly thrilled. “You get to really develop character.” She’ll also get to develop some chemistry with All My Children stud Thorsten Kaye when he shows up as a bartender who helps her do more than drown her sorrows.

For its dueling ingenues, Smash is blessed with an embarrassment of riches in both stage vet Megan Hilty (Wicked) and Katharine McPhee, the Season 5 American Idol alum who came with Spielberg’s seal of approval. “I think he’d seen her for a film and said, ‘We should think about Kat McPhee for this,’” says Greenblatt. Best known as a singer, McPhee’s revelatory turn as newbie Karen Cartwright is already silencing her naysayers. “I know, it’s like, ‘What? Steven Spielberg cast her as an actress?’” says the brunette stunner with a laugh, adding that previous post-Idol endeavors to find work (The House Bunny, a Community guest spot) mirror her untested alter ego’s frustrations. “Going in for every major film you could imagine, coming really close to getting them, being up there against two or three or five other girls and not getting it [because] I didn’t have a big enough résumé… it’s literally a real-life story that I have lived and I deal with on a daily basis that we’re telling in the show.”

Likewise, Hilty finds her star-making gig as Karen’s blonder, bustier competition, embittered chorus girl Ivy Lynn, easily accessible. “I have gone to school with this character, I’ve done community theater with this character, I am part of this character,” says the sunny belter who earned a Drama Desk nod for playing the Dolly Parton role in 9 to 5: The Musical. “It’s too good to be true to have a television series about my world and all the things I love so dearly. I wanted to be a part of it so badly.” Not only did she get the part, but she also gets Bernadette Peters as her mom, who shows up mid-season and sends her daughter on a downward spiral.

And while Hilty and McPhee show off some serious vocal ranges in each episode — production numbers routinely veer between the reality of rehearsals and the fantasy of what the opening-night version might look like — it’s the operatic off-stage collision of these ladies, as well as the arrival in later episodes of Uma Thurman as a movie star who wants to play Marilyn — that will propel the series toward a splashy season finale built around the Marilyn out-of-town tryout. “You have two women who are so different in every way imaginable, and we’re forced to be together constantly in very uncomfortable situations,” says Hilty. “And with that comes some very real drama.”

Should that drama work on screen, there is the possibility of it moving, meta-style, to the stage. “If this Marilyn turns out to be terrific, after following it for a season, we [could] then take it to Broadway,” predicts Meron’s producing partner Craig Zadan. “Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman will write more songs, Theresa Rebeck will write the book… and Neil and I will produce it with Spielberg and the [DreamWorks] group. So we’d have a Broadway show.”

They might even have a smash.

Smash premieres Monday, February 6 at 10/9c on NBC.

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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.

Smash follows Julia Houston (Debra Messing) and Tom Levitt (Christian Borle), a songwriting duo fresh off a hit show who put plans to take a break on hold when they decide to tackle a Broadway biography of Monroe.

Quickly, two actresses are vying for the coveted part: Ivy Lynn (Hilty), an ambitious chorus girl hungering for a lead role, and Karen Cartwright (American Idol‘s Katharine McPhee), a naïve Iowa transplant looking for a break, who’s quickly “disgusted by the ugliness of the business, the game you have to play,” McPhee says.

One wins the part in the second episode, but she won’t necessarily keep it as Marilyn wends its long way to Broadway.

Show exudes talent

Steven Spielberg came up with the idea for Smash while Greenblatt was entertainment president at Showtime, and the pet project followed him — minus the nudity and adult language — to NBC, where it must appeal to a much broader audience to succeed. It’s stocked with Broadway actors and executive producers, including director Michael Mayer (Spring Awakening), producers Neil Meron and Craig Zadan (Chicago), and creator and head writer Theresa Rebeck (Seminar).

The network switch, Meron says, forced Rebeck to “examine what this show is on a more universal level” and “make it into a bigger world, going deeper into people’s lives outside the theater.”

Original songs by the Broadway team of lyricist Scott Wittman and composer Marc Shaiman (Hairspray) serve a dual purpose. “Marilyn is the conduit to tell the story of Smash characters, so it’s a little more layered,” Wittman says. “Success, failure, sex, power is all wrapped in her story, which is also the story of these people as they claw their way to somewhere.”

The show mixes music with soap suds and sets its sights on the entire Broadway orbit, from a scheming assistant to budding stars and their clashing egos. “It’s like Upstairs, Downstairs, but instead of having a mansion, we have a musical,” Rebeck says.

Anjelica Huston plays Eileen Rand, a producer whose recent divorce from her partner/husband dashes a plan to stage The Sound of Music and complicates efforts to get Marilyn made. “The investors are shy about putting their money in with her. She’s finding out that things are not as easy as they look,” Huston says.

Jack Davenport plays Derek Wills, the arrogant director brought in to helm the project, who Davenport suspects is a “mild sociopath.” And Julia is trying to adopt a baby with her husband, a plan complicated when she’s reteamed with an ex-flame (Will Chase) who plays Marilyn‘s DiMaggio. (In a real-life twist, Messing and Chase have been linked romantically.)

“There’s a lot of conflict within her, because she loves being a mom, she loves being a wife,” Messing says. “But she can’t walk away from the Marilyn idea, and she has to deal with the consequences. We get to follow the private, personal lives of each of these characters, and that allows us and the viewers to really invest emotionally.”

Messing, best known as a star of NBC’s long-running sitcom Will & Grace, is surely invested. Starting out her career, “I intended to be in the theater, that was my goal,” she says. “Obviously it didn’t go that route for me, and so to be able to literally come full circle, to be in a TV show that’s been mostly my genre, but about musical theater in New York, it’s the greatest gift I could ever have imagined.”

McPhee says she especially identifies with Karen, based on her experiences after Idol (she was runner-up to Taylor Hicks in the show’s fifth season). “I know what my character goes through, feeling like you’re so right for something, but they want a star,” she says. “Or getting so close to something and you don’t get it and you don’t really know why, and it’s sometimes over the silliest thing.”

For McPhee, “It’s been five or six years of pounding the pavement. Every actor has some sort of challenge to overcome: They’re not thin enough or tall enough or pretty enough. For me, I’d get really good feedback, but it was either I wasn’t famous enough or people didn’t want to see you because you came from a reality show.”

A note of thanks to ‘Glee’

While distancing their show from Glee, Smash‘s creators express a debt of gratitude to Fox’s high school series for “proving how wildly successful a musical can be on television, because a lot of people have done it and failed,” Rebeck says.

Smash lacks that instant youth appeal, and liberally sprinkled real-life references to Broadway fixtures and a theater critic Julia calls a “Napoleonic Nazi” may leave some viewers perplexed. “The public appears to have either a fascination or total indifference to stories about show business, and there’s never any telling which way the wind is blowing until you put it out in the world,” Davenport says.

Meron says the “rarefied” world of Broadway has been made more accessible by the prominence of Broadway touring companies that blanket the nation. And authentic insider talk is not necessarily off-putting, Messing says: “It’s peeking behind the curtain. I never studied politics, and The West Wing was my favorite show for years.”

Adds Rebeck, “We all go to musical theater for a kind of communal expression of joy.”

The first season spans about nine months, but she sees a long life ahead: “There’s no question in my mind that this world can remain big and complicated the way any show would.”

In success, NBC will likely opt for a similarly shortened second season to run uninterrupted. But viewer interest all comes down to the right blend of music, dancing, drama and the authentic labor pains of putting on a show, in which career hopes are stoked and dashed and compromises made, in the run-up from workshop to out-of-town tryout to Broadway debut.

“That may sound cliché, but it’s all stuff that happens,” says Greenblatt, who tasted failure with his first stab at Broadway producing a 2009 remake of Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 that starred Hilty and closed just weeks before Spielberg called with his pitch. “It’s 42nd Street: You’re going out there a chorus girl and you’re coming back a star. When was that, 1933? It still works.”

At least, that’s the dream.

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Off-brand as they might seem, the football plugs are part of a massive marketing and publicity push for the series about the making of a Marilyn Monroe stage musical. Smash, which premieres Feb. 6, is being peddled everywhere from art museums to macho sporting events to such male-dominated TV hubs as Golf Channel and G4. In fact, NBC chief Bob Greenblatt, eager for his first scripted success, has spent a surprising sum on off-network promotions for the Debra Messing-Katharine McPhee drama.

Although one well-placed source pegs the spend at about $22 million — double what premium cable networks typically allocate to promote a new series — NBC Entertainment marketing president Len Fogge, who followed Greenblatt from Showtime, vehemently refutes that figure, placing it at less than $10 million. “We’ve been very strategic in how we’ve spent the marketing dollars,” he tells THR, suggesting the Smash budget is below the high-water mark spent on heavily hyped 2010 flop The Event. “What I’m hoping is that our less-than-$10 million campaign, plus the NBC assets that have really stepped up to support us … feels like a much bigger campaign. We’re trying to make noise.”

The marketing deluge, which many describe as an “all-in” mentality at the network, has stretched to every corner of the Comcast universe, with promos appearing on Bravo, Oxygen and E! and the pilot available for free streaming on Comcast’s digital platforms as well as iTunes, American Airlines flights and such sites as RyanSeacrest.com and Hulu. In addition to elaborate, cable-style publicity materials, screening events have taken place at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. And the show will be featured on TV’s biggest stage: NBC’s coverage of Feb. 5′s Super Bowl. (While they’re not performing, McPhee and co-star Megan Hilty will be in Indianapolis for events and photo ops.)

The high-priced rollout flies in the face of industry fears that the series could be too niche to attract the kind of broad audience that traditionally fuels network hits, a characteristic that proved the downfall of Fox’s Lone Star and NBC’s Prime Suspect.

“NBC’s massive push may get eyeballs to the premiere, and it may do a respectable number, but I don’t think it will be the hit they’re looking for,” says Linda Ong, president and founder of New York-based marketing and branding company Truth Consulting, whose clients have included USA, Bravo and History.

Greenblatt acknowledged the concerns last summer when he told reporters that Smash “may be the most adventurous show that we do, and it ultimately may be the most narrow show we do.” He also has noted that it will take more than one hit to get NBC out of the ratings basement, where the network has lived for more than half a decade.

To date, critical buzz for the Steven Spielberg-produced drama has been high, with THR critic Tim Goodman calling Smash “excellent, a bar-raiser for broadcast networks.” Others talk of the series’ awards potential, something that has remained largely the domain of cable in recent years, and its potential to draw the educated, upscale, urban viewers that defined NBC during its “must see” years.

“I’d say the 1990s equivalent of the Smash audience might be the Frasier audience, and I don’t think there is anyone at NBC that wouldn’t say, ‘Where do we sign up for that?’ ” says Warren Littlefield, former NBC chief and author of the upcoming book Top of the Rock. “These days, broadcast television is looking more and more closely at the success of cable and some of the unique worlds that cable goes into and saying, ‘We’ll take a loyal following if it’s the right following.’”

Still, expensive production numbers have pushed the per-episode cost of Smash to about $3.5 million, say sources, more than most first season broadcast dramas (and roughly on par with Glee). Observers suggest Smash needs a 3 rating — if not slightly higher — in the 18-to-49 demo to recoup its cost in ad revenue. NBC is averaging a 1.8 rating in the demo (5.9 million viewers) during the 10 p.m. slot Monday through Friday; the only two NBC series to average a 3 or higher this season are reality reboot Fear Factor and the long-running The Office. Madison Avenue has been optimistic, shelling out $155,000 for 30-second spots — one of the highest rates for a freshman drama — during the upfront selling period.

Working in Smash‘s favor is lead-in The Voice, which was granted the coveted post-Super Bowl spot. While NBC sources suggest internal expectations for the breakout singing competition are being lowered due to the recent ratings stumbles of The X Factor and American Idol, few doubt Voice finally will give NBC a series in the top 30, and likely in the top 10, this season. Will it lift Smash in the process?

Greenblatt is tempering expectations. “I don’t believe it is a make-or-break kind of show for us,” he told reporters in January. “If it isn’t [a hit], it’s not like we’re going to go into receivership.”

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Debuting Feb. 6, the buzzy (with good reason) backstage drama about the making of a Broadway musical about Marilyn Monroe has a riveting who’ll-get-the-part? plot, great musical numbers, and lots of name talent on camera and behind the scenes. The show is the brainchild of Steven Spielberg, who assembled a team including musical theater vets Neil Meron and Craig Zadan and composer-lyricists Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman. Besides Huston, Messing, and Hilty, the cast includes Brian D’Arcy James, Jack Davenport and “American Idol” alumna Katharine McPhee as Hilty’s rival for the musical’s lead role.

“When I got the script I couldn’t put it down. I knew immediately that it was a once in a lifetime thing. I had to play this character,” says Messing, whose vow never to do an hour-long drama, not to mention one that meant relocating to New York, went out the window. She was drawn to both the career and home life aspects of songwriter Julia Houston, “who is very passionate about her creative life and also a proud mother and wants that balance. I love that nothing is simple.”

Hilty was similarly enthralled with the role of Ivy Lynn, and the idea of playing the iconic Monroe. “Her story is one of tragedy, heartbreak, glamour, love, and all things that make for great drama, all things that people want to watch and are intrigued by, which is why we’re still talking about her today,” she says, opining that “Smash” “sets the stage for high drama, because the adrenaline’s going and the stakes are so high. This show definitely taps into all of those things.”

Huston wasn’t looking to do a series when the offer came her way, but she couldn’t turn down the role of producer Eileen Rand. “She’s real woman working in a man’s world. It’s not just a black and white character. There’s a lot of grey area with her. Is she a b*tch? Yeah, she’s a b*tch,” laughs the Oscar winner, who was eager to work “with the best of the best. I’d be a fool not to participate.”

Huston, a dedicated PETA supporter, has spoken out against the commercial use of great apes in the entertainment industry. “They really don’t like acting,” she says, and made a video for PETA explaining that. “Chimpanzees and orangutans belong in rain forests, where they can build nests, forage for natural foods, make and use tools, groom each other, and raise families,” she says in the PSA. “Using great apes in TV, movies, and advertising … causes a lifetime of suffering.”

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Television Works > Smash (2011) > Season 1 > On Set – January 26th, 2012