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| Season 1 Marketing |
The Spielberg Produced, lady led; or rather, once led by ladies Network show SMASH has premiered for it's second season.
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| Season 2 |
This show has become one of the most vibrant "Hate-Watch" Shows in recent memory. This has inspired a spate of quite interesting commentary on the phenomenon and the show itself.
"Hate-watching is the act of watching a show that you claim to dislike
with the sole purpose of mocking it. With the recent return of
Smash, a
highly
mockable melodrama about the behind-the-scenes happenings of a Broadway
production, hate-watching seems to be a hot button term in TV writing,
but is hate-watching even a real thing? Or do we just refuse to admit
that we like shitty things?"
Jezebel took on the question of Hate-Watching
I for one love the snarky critique of a piece of work often more than the work itself. I couldn't do my job if I couldn't find ways to enjoy things that aren't masterpieces.
New York Magazine's Gossip Girl Recaps (With New York Reality Indexing) got me through seasons 1-6 and made the show required watching so that I would at least be in on the best jokes.
This type of watching is genuinely social in a way that is very modern. The question of whether or not you like a show is almost immaterial if you LOVE the conversation around it and it brings you joy. And Lord does gossiping about fictional characters bring joy. The trouble is, sometimes stories are bad, sometimes they're so bad their good, and sometimes they're genuinely awful and defy even ones ability to mock them. The Internet helps, there are some gifted comedians out there who could mock the least compelling things imaginable and be charming, but that isn't something that necessarily means that it should be an aspiration for a show to be Hate-Watched.
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| Season 1 Marketing |
So what does it mean for a show that was notionally about Theatre; and about Theatre Production, sort of about Marilyn Monroe and sort of about an American Idol star and still trying to pry a Broadway Theatrical Production in real life out of the clutches of whatever it is that is going on here.
The best deconstruction I've seen of the situation in the real life production I've seen comes from Buzzfeed, that put out a delightful long read about the behind-the-scenes drama of the behind-the-scenes drama that led to the creatives changes between season 1 and season 2.
On Buzzfeed:
"How does a lovingly looked-after show with such high stakes for all involved become a joke? Smash
is a case study: in how megalomania and television can clash
unproductively; in how high expectations can crash immediately; and in
how intense network and studio oversight can result in a paranoid show
creator who causes workplace misery and, most importantly, a bad TV
show."
You should read the whole thing, it helps understand a lot of the tension that is clear between the two takes on the concept that are clearly, quite diverse.
Smash isn’t just shallow, selfish, stupid, and narcissistic:
it’s a hundred percent sure that everyone else in the world is, too.
The other commentary that you absolutely must read on the subject of Smash is from Chris Braak, who I am quoting above and below:
Or else take Jennifer Hudson’s advice to Katherine McPhee, about her
burgeoning career as a Broadway star: “Protect the work,” she says.
“Someone’s always waiting to take you down, but if the work’s good, they
won’t be able to.” If you cared about the work, then there might
be times when you sacrificed of yourself in order to improve it: you
might say, for example, “This show is good, but it would be better if it
starred you, Megan Hilty,” and then you’d back out of the production.
In that sense, if the work’s good then it doesn’t matter if someone else
takes you down, because you’ve contributed to something that is greater
than yourself, and it’s impossible for someone to take that away from
you. But Smash does not draw a distinction between “the work” and
“the star”. What Jennifer Hudson means by “the work” is “your meteoric
rise to fame and fortune”; there’s nothing ennobling about this at all,
nothing that even resembles the need for personal or artistic
expression. Smash is about getting famous, full-stop.
Whether it’s because the show is afraid that genuinely grappling with
the human condition would be off-putting to the coveted 18-35 year old
demographic, or because the people working on it do not themselves have
any particular interest in art, the show is utterly disinterested in
anything except the most banal aspects of Broadway. This kind of
shallowness colors everything about the show, and it’s what makes the
show ultimately toxic. That’s because Smash isn’t just a
commercial enterprise on its own – tacky, yes, but everyone’s got to eat
– it’s an enterprise that characterizes everything else it touches as
equally hollow and grasping. It doesn’t just fail to understand the
theater, or the people who work in it for reasons other than “I want to
be a star”, it grossly misunderstands them, describes them according to
its own distorted sense of self, and then parades around presenting them
to the world.
You may remember Braak from such elegant diagrams as
The Perils of Empowerment if you read me regularly, you should be reading him as well. So, it seems clear that the show will be moving from being about "producing a show" (if it ever was) to "stories about people who produce shows" and mores the pity. If there's anything we could all use it's a genuinely interesting behind-the-scenes show that isn't entirely about sex or violence. (Who wants to bet me that a gun shows up on screen in this season?)
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| Season 2 |
Mothers don't let your daughters grow up to be Gossip Girls.
While the character Ivy was the sex pot last season, it's clear that an early departure in the new showrunner's aesthetic. The new showrunner is making a concerted effort to go after a different demographic market with his CW approved vision of New York Glamour. Fame is central and everyone is considerably more sexed up than in the previous showrunner's vision.
Most visibly the difference in the Katherine McPhee character, for a reasonably conservative mid-western ingenue, in contrast to the seasoned Broadway vet, Meghan Tilly.
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| Katherine McPhee a Prim farm girl who covers up in Season 1 |
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| Season 2 sees McPhee in a "Serena VanDerWoodsen" Cut Gown by the 30 minute mark. |
Gossip Girl had an almost magical ability to dress it's protagonist Serena VanDerWoodsen in outfits that were remarkably revealing. It almost seemed like a game they were playing with the audience, putting Blake Lively in a gown that seemed like it was demure, but when she turned around the high necked full length gown would be entirely backless. It appears that that aesthetic has fully infected the burgeoning star, complete with magical just barely breast containing undergarment technology.
With any luck, we'll see scandals that inspire wit from the characters, who have often been one-note charcatures of desperation, earnestness or naivete.
"Did you Dress Warmly for Your Trip to the Moral High Ground?"
-Derek, the Sexual Predator Director
What other stylistic changes will we see? My money is on "every episode contains at least one gala event that brings all the characters together in formal wear", "Fish out of water from Brooklyn" (who as a note, was introduced in episode 1) and "everyone ends up living together as a couple at least once before season 3". Other bets are in, including a pool on cancellation as the premiere was down
71% from the first season premiere how much time will the network give this show and how much time does the new showrunner have to turn it around... and will it be a hit among its new demographic target or will it bomb?
"Voyeuristic sex, prolific
infidelity, a teenage girl seduced by a grown man — Reign. So too are scenes of extreme violence, including one featuring a decapitated head spewing blood these things are
tame enough for the CW's period drama. But a young woman masturbating? Good heavens, no." [Salon] 
While some might say, isn't this a derivitive game of thrones? just like Da Vinci's Demons was a derivative Borgias (or Assassin's Creed?). That's a fair critique I suppose, but for me personally, I'm a fan of getting multiple perspectives on a story. It's what I've based entire career on the appeal of being able to provide a grander narrartive context in different stories. So, it's compelling to see these historical periods explored from different artistic visions. Especially when they're done well. 
Read this article, and if you REALLY want to be disturbed watch Ruby Sparks. 
"Everything you hated about Twilight — the bad dialogue, the sappy scenarios and drippy characters, the eye-rolling politics — is made right in Beautiful Creatures. This flick is a supernatural high school romance full of teenagers who talk like real human beings and make decisions that aren't entirely stupid. And yet it's still a terrific, fun flight of fancy about witches, ghosts of the Civil War, and a small southern town where church ladies fight librarians for the souls of the young. This is the movie you never expected to like — but you probably will. "
"The film paints an evocative picture of life in a dead-end fundamentalist American small town and is unapologetic about depicting some unpleasant sides of religious fundamentalism. But while the film outright soars when it focuses on character and human interaction, it cannot withstand the weight of its own overly contrived mythology. The deeper the film gets into its central conflict the more of a mechanical plot exercise it becomes. So superb is the first two thirds of Beautiful Creatures that I felt genuine disappointment when the film flubbed the landing, ending itself in the territory of merely 'very good.' "
More than marketing, understanding what your audience loves, or at least what brings them joy about something is essential to crafting an experience they'll invest their time in. For a show like Sex and the City, there was the idea that "water-cooler conversation" equated to "girls night chatter" or "4 Cosmo brunches." This is what hate-watching is, the more open, more public review of your project and the honest assessment of the people who love your show most. If you can't even inspire that, you genuinely need to rethink why you're doing it."Being something of a professional Sex and the City-eviscerator, I fully planned to watch the premiere of The Carrie Diaries and offer hella bon mots about peplum skirts and Samantha's future-vulva. But then, you know, life and not-caring got in the way, and now we're four episodes in and there are already rumblings about cancellation! And I haven't even figured out yet whether or not I should care! As ratings have been rather dismal, it seems as though most of you haven't figured it out yet either. But don't worry. I'm on it. Below, you'll get the dirt on everything that has happened so far.
