All you DVRers out there caught up on this week’s Smash yet?  You guys… this Show.  This is becoming some kind of abusive relationship.  It keeps telling me it wants to change, and buys me flowers and chocolates and strokes my hair and tells me I’m pretty, but then it suddenly turns cold and cruel and embarrasses me in front of my friends after I’ve told them that things are looking up.  Kinda like Director D-bag and Ivy!

So last week, you know how I was all, “hey, this is how the show should be done!”  And the show was focused, and pulled together, and didn’t devote a lot of time to all the stupid crap that we can’t stand about it?

I should have known it would get drunk and call me stupid again.

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Now THIS is what I’m talking about!  A tighter, much more focused episode that centers around the workshop, with the peripheral foolishness (Michael and Julia’s affair, Tom’s awkward boyfriend) more or less limited to how it affects the production and the people working on it.  This is what I signed on for.

1.  The workshop is upon us, but wait!  The studio building’s boiler is on the fritz, causing a tropical heatwave in the building.  With all of those rich, potential investors who don’t like to sweat coming to view the workshop, Eileen is all over the superintendent to get it fixed.  He has put in the phone call, but the workers are unionized and will get to it when they get to it.  Fortunately for Eileen, bartender Nick from her new favorite place, the Bushwhack, “knows a guy.”  He’s unlicensed and an illegal alien, but he’ll do the job for payment under the table.  Eileen accepts that offer, even breaking the padlock off of the boiler room door so he can work.  Grateful for the connection, Eileen invites Nick to stay and watch the performance.  I think there may have been a little flirtation there too, but I’m going to ignore that for now because…

Okay, look.  I’m just gonna say it.  Anjelica Huston?  Is a fine, fine actress, but she is more than a little… unfortunate looking.  Especially with that Cleopatra haircut that presents her face with all the subtlety of a well-honed battle-axe.  I don’t want to see her getting all down and dirty with the downtown barkeep (or with anyone else at all, really), is what I’m sayin’.  Still, I like the character of Eileen more than I ever thought I would, especially when CW comes tattling to her about Michael and Julia’s affair, and she shuts him down with a quickness:  ”I won’t pretend that this isn’t useful information.  But if you repeat this to anyone, I will see that you never work on this production, or any other, ever again.”

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Time for our weekly installment of Smash.  Too many characters?  Check.  Too many plotlines?  Check.  Half of those plot lines boring and/or irrelevant?  Check.  Okay!  Looks like we’re good to go!

1.  Despite the workshop that is scheduled to take place — in front of potential backers — in one week, Julia has still not finished the story or the lyrics.  She tries to plead Frank’s absence and Leo’s recent brush with the law as an excuse, but it’s mainly because she is too busy daydreaming over Michael to do things like write lyrics or cook pancakes without burning them.  Michael is not making things any easier, first accosting her at rehearsal and threatening to cause a scene if she doesn’t talk to him, then calling her house and chitchatting with her recently-returned husband before prevailing on her to meet him at 10:00 at night in the rehearsal room.  Meet him she does, ostensibly to “get through to him,” but I think she knew damned good and well what was going to happen before she even stepped outside her door.  And what happens is that Michael is a Class A douchenozzle, going on about how he can’t think if he doesn’t touch her, and unbuttoning her…

Okay, she’s either wearing a pajama shirt, or one of Frank’s shirts, and I’m pretty sure it’s the former, but I’m definitely sure it’s not the sort of thing one should be walking around the streets in.  Anyway…

Michael convinces Julia that maybe they can just look at each other, and since she is not in fact in the 6th grade and playing her first game of spin-the-bottle with Steve Cunningham in the upstairs of his garage (not that I, um, did something like that or anything… oh, shut up.), she should damn well know better.  But since I think she went there knowing full well that she was going to hit a home run with Joe DiMaggio, she lets him take her shirt off, then take his shirt off, and then there’s shirtless hugging, and then there’s the conveniently placed pleather sofa right there under the windows…

I think you get the idea.  Not getting the idea?  Frank, who is clueless about the affair five years ago and was hoping to have Michael over for a beer.  Awkward…   But hey!  The GOOD news is that Julia’s writer’s block was apparently located in her vagina, because once she “rehearses” with Michael she’s able to complete the lyrics and get the story back on track.

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Um, Show?  Look, can we talk?  I don’t know if you’re aware of this, but your ratings are kinda saying more “crash” than “Smash” right now.  People are not so much watching live as they are DVRing you, and sometimes they’re not even bothering to watch what they’ve DVR’d.  You’ve had several articles come out over the last couple of weeks that speculate as to why you’re not really working out.  I want you to do well, I truly do.  But when you take this episode’s titular song and apply it as a philosophy for how you’re writing and running your show, this is a problem.

Let me ask you a question, folks:  Does this show come off to you like an 8-year-old with ADHD after he’s had five Jolt sodas and an entire 24-pack of candy bars?  Because that’s how it seems to me, but then I’m trying to take notes so I can write y’all a recap, so maybe it’s just me.  Either way, holy JEEBUS with all of the scene cuts!!  What in the actual fuck, Show?  Three lines of superfluous dialogue and we’re on to another scene?  Really?!

All right, let’s just do this.

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…to say that, in all likelihood, there won’t BE any more Smash recaps.  Since they don’t seem to be getting many hits, and they’re definitely not drawing commentary, I’m pretty much throwing in the towel.

If I’m wrong, and there are dozens of you out there anxiously awaiting my Smash recaps every Tuesday morning (yeah, I’m holding my breath here) then speak up and I’ll continue, but if I’m a lone tree in the forest and no one is going to hear me, there’s no point in falling over.

So, sing now or forever hold your peace.

Man, I think I’m actually a little in love with this show.  (At least as a viewer; as a recapper, it can be a little crazy-making with all of the scene cuts and the jumping around from plot point to plot point, but I’m just going to break it down by character arcs instead of going chronologically.  We’ll all be much happier that way, trust me.)  And I mean, I’m not ready to go exclusive, or move in or start picking out China patterns or anything, but I am telling my friends about the and maybe drawing a puffy heart or two around its name in my Trapper Keeper.  Which is a pleasant surprise, since I was expecting at most a dirty, guilty pleasure.

Speaking of dirty, guilty pleasures, we open the episode with Director D-bag and Ivy going at it in bed.  He barely has time to slide out of her before he’s talking about work, and you can see that this was maybe not Ivy’s ideal pillow-talk.  She suggests that maybe the two of them can get together so she can just work on Marilyn.  Director D-bag counters that he thought that’s what they were just doing.  And I totally want to call him out on that and be all offended on her behalf and talk about how he’s so keeping the D-bag nickname, but given the very Marilyn-esque “O” sounds that were just coming out of Ivy’s mouth, and given the fact that she’s been on the scene for long enough to know that sleeping with the director is probably not the best idea in the grand scheme of things, I’m gonna go ahead and give him a pass on that one comment.  Not on everything in this episode, but on that one comment.  Cool?

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Okay, so this episode was maybe not quite as Smashtastic! as the pilot, but it was a solid episode coming off of it.  By the end of the episode the main plot had been advanced, we added more depth to some of the characters, and we got some more songs to add to our Smash playlists, for those of you playing along at home.  That’s not so bad for a second episode, right?

Main plot:

We cold-open on Karen singing Blondie’s “Call Me” in a small bar/lounge setting, with Dev, Julia and Tom amongst the audience members.  Despite Katherine McPhee singing the hell out of that song (seriously, WHO won that season of Idol?!), it is in fact a fake out:  Karen is actually at work, daydreaming about the callback she’s anxiously awaiting when she should be pouring coffee.  Oops.  Good thing the other waitress covered for her.  Bet she cadges the tip from that table, though.

Ivy is also anxiously awaiting a callback, but she’s a least able to feign being a little more zen about it.  Her friends, fellow dancers in Heaven on Earth, try to cheer her up, saying that the part is obviously hers.

Tom would wholeheartedly like to agree, but both Julia and Director D-bag are leaning more toward Karen, with Eileen waffling, and it’s terribly up in the air between the two girls, demonstrated beautifully by Julia imagining the opening number “Let Me Be Your Star” that bounces back and forth between the two potential leads.  Since they can’t agree to agree yet, they decide to hold a “workshop,” which basically amounts to some choreography rehearsal for Karen and some scene work for Ivy, who already showed them that she has the moves by performing the baseball number.  They also decide they need to know more about Karen, so Eileen calls her connection with the CIA.  You know, as one does.

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