Smash: The Read-Through (2x05)

Oh, Smash. What a fantastic disaster you are. I watched all of last season with maniacal glee. (Oh God, pardon the pun-like association with that other musical TV show we all know and love to hate). This new season has been so much better than the last. I absolutely adore the new additions of Kyle and Jimmy, played by Andy Mientus and Jeremy Jordan respectively. I like the addition of a new musical to the mix, and the idea that our familiar musical, Bombshell, needs a major reboot. It seems like a rather humorous meta-reference to the fact that the show itself is being rebooted under new show-runner Josh Safran.

So... last week we got "The Song," a fantastic and emotionally powerful episode that had a simple theme, starred the beautiful and talented Jennifer Hudson, and came to a dramatic and rewarding climax. The music was great and the character arcs lovely.

This week? Well... to be honest there was nothing about "The Read Through" on the surface that should have made it bad. It has three main story-lines, two of which center around a read-through, hence the title. Individually, each of these threads was interesting, but when put together the episode felt very disjointed, disorganized, and, well... crowded. This show needs to take a note from Once Upon a Time and other big ensemble shows, and learn that it doesn't have to follow all of its characters every week. I'd rather have a week off from Ivy or Karen or whoever, so that we could more deeply explore each of these plots and characters.

There was good and bad in this episode. Let's take a look:

I liked that Kyle's dialogue wasn't good. It made me feel really bad for the character, and I do hope they redeem him by having him have a lot of skill in another area... maybe Jimmy does provide all of the creative talent for the show, but maybe Kyle ends up having administrative or management genius, and becomes a junior producer or assistant stage manager or something. That would be interesting. As of right now, the poor guy is just a failed book writer and basically the caretaker for the sporadic "tortured artist" Jimmy. Their partnership mirrors Julia's and Tom's, because while Tom's songs were praised in Bombshell, Julia's book was not.

Karen and Jimmy's budding romance? Ugh. Seriously? You're going for the "misunderstanding" idea? Really, now. Because that has never been done. I feel like the show is just wasting our time.

The idea that Julia's book was just "too good" for Broadway really got on my nerves. It only emphasized a big problem with the show - we spend so much time with this made up musical, but we don't have any real sense of the direction they take with the plot. Am I the only one that wants to actually see Bombshell? It feels like a huge cop-out that Julia's book was just SO AMAZING, but we don't get to see even a hint of it. 

Also, it felt really stupid to me that Jerry wasn't willing to produce Julia's new book, but he WAS willing to produce a really early version of the script. Ummm.... if Tom liked that earlier version so much, why wasn't that the one that they went with? What happened to this earlier version that got totally scrapped? It was a super weird and random element to throw in there.

And now for Ivy's thread. I may get crap for saying this, but I kinda like it. I'm rooting for Ivy. I thought it was nice to see her have a new show to work on, to land the lead, and now to see her doing a good job at it. I even liked the idea of an unorthodox person cast as a lead in the show due to name recognition (even though this is painfully recycled from the Rebecca Duvall plot of last season). 

But... the stuff that happened in this one episode could have been spread out over 2 or even 3. It all came to a head too quickly. It was also a bit of a dumb ending to have actor Terry Falls decided to go off of his medicine in order to better connect to the show. I mean, what? Where did that come from?

That was basically my main problem with this episode: too much happened. The same plot points could have been spread out over two episodes. Maybe this would have been an good opportunity for the show to do a double episode. Who knows? Over all, this wasn't a bad episode, but it didn't quite hit home with me.

6/10