And so Smash ends as it lived—with a weirdly self-referential musical number and a Tony Awards ceremony with all the gravitas of a high-school-athletic awards banquet. The series so amazing it got a very special welcome to the NBC family from Jack Donaghy himself died a death of a million tiny bludgeons to the head, thousands upon thousands of small moments of idiocy that added up to what amounted to a somewhat confused fellow staggering around, all the while attempting to sing.
Or, put another way, I really enjoy watching awards ceremonies. I really enjoy watching people compete for meaningless prizes, enjoy the moments when the picks of whatever academy match up with my own personal tastes. But it turns out that fictional awards ceremonies are not exactly the best vehicle for drama.
Smash locks the characters into the theatre presenting the Tony Awards about 10 minutes into its final hour, and then it keeps them there. And keeps them there. And keeps them there. And maybe if we gave two shits about any of these people, it would have some drama to it—but we don’t, though I will admit to some visceral satisfaction when Ivy Lynn defeated Karen Cartwright for a fictional prize. Why were we supposed to care? The characters seemed to care only obliquely, or in the sense that they had all said the word “Tonys” so often in the last few weeks that it was supposed to make us care. But that sense never radiated out to the audience, so preoccupied was the show with making sure there was bullshit personal drama there to keep us “engaged.” For two episodes of television about whether the characters in the show would have a career-topping night that might make sure they worked for a decade, “Nominations” and “The Tonys” both felt curiously weightless, devoid of anything but pompous self-congratulation.
Also, Derek fires a woman who’d just won the Tony for Featured Actress in a Musical right before she goes onstage to perform Hit List’s featured number—which could boost the show’s ticket sales among out-of-town visitors—before a live television audience. Instead of this, the rest of the cast of Hit List, including Ana, who hasn’t been in the cast of Hit List for some time, wanders out on stage and starts performing a version of “Broadway Here I Come!” featuring elaborate body percussion, all while dressed in their evening wear. Now, I suppose this is all exciting if you don’t stop to think about the realities of TV production or theatrical staging or human behavior, but it signals something quickly: Smash took the Tonys about as seriously as it took anything else, which is to say that it took them as an excuse to make it all about stuff it never adequately convinced us was worth caring about, like Ivy’s pregnancy or Ana’s ouster or Derek’s sexual-harassment lawsuit.
There are some fun bits in both hours. The campaign for the Tonys is entertaining enough—particularly when we get a very brief glimpse of some of the other shows on Broadway that season, including what appears to be a musical about Winston Churchill with a book by Harvey Fierstein(!)—and I enjoyed some of the moments when the two musicals badmouth each other. There’s also some okay stuff present in the politicking to appear sincere in front of the Outer Critics Circle awards body, since that’s the best chance for someone like Tom to make a good impression and for Julia to appear magnanimous about defeating a dead person. Campaigning for awards has to be a weird process for a famous person, and these sequences get into some of that weirdness in a way that is fairly identifiable.
I also liked the idea that Bombshell’s late surge—the show wins at least three Tonys (score, actress, and musical)—is prompted as much by Derek’s self-immolation (prompted by Ivy telling him he hasn’t done the right thing, not once) as it is anything else, though I like to imagine that the people who are constantly telling Ivy and company that Hit List is overrated are members of this comments section. There are some adequate moments in the first hour, and it’s probably one of the stronger episodes of this season. It’s a little goofy the way that it all concludes with the characters sitting around, listening to the nominations being read out while music from Magnolia plays on the soundtrack (at least on my screener!), because we know there’s no way the regulars aren’t getting nominated (though I almost threw my computer out a window when I thought Ivy had been snubbed in favor of Karen). It makes for fairly boring television, but it’s probably better than just having Daphne Rubin-Vega waltz in and tell everyone how many nominations they got (which they would already know). Also, it allows Smash to fill in the world of the fake Broadway season it takes place in, like how Sutton Foster is nominated for a revival of Oliver! of all things. (I would not take her for a particularly great Nancy, but I suspect she would just grit her teeth and make it the best thing on Broadway all season.)
It’s the second hour where things immediately begin to fall apart. The episode opens with everybody singing “Under Pressure” by Queen and David Bowie—because they’re under pressure, see?—and it just trucks downhill from there. The worst thing about this is that it isn’t particularly bad or even mediocre. It’s just boring. Julia and Tom talking through the announcement of their win is probably the one thing that actually worked for me, and I didn’t believe for a second that this would actually happen. (That goes for almost everything in the episode.) Jimmy accepts Kyle’s award on his dead friend’s behalf and makes a staggering amount of that acceptance speech about Karen. Derek accomplishes the aforementioned what-the-fuckery right before Daisy is going to go onstage. The whole thing feels like it’s taking place in a Holiday Inn ballroom. The characters seem to constantly be in every single place at all times. After all of that brouhaha about who would direct Bombshell, we don’t even get to find out who wins director of a musical. (Presumably, it’s neither Tom nor Derek, since neither of them seems to have an extra trophy, but who knows?)
The worst thing about “The Tonys” is that it takes something that’s supposed to be a grand celebration of the theatre and makes it all a grand celebration of Smash. Some of that is unavoidable. It was unlikely that the series would get Angela Lansbury to appear as herself to present an award or something, and it’s obvious that the show simply didn’t have the budget anymore to portray the award as anything other than a series of very tight shots on people sitting in the audience, a handful of extras sitting around them. Yet the rest of it just feels ridiculous, the conclusion of a story that’s less about putting on a Broadway show than any number of weird melodramatics. Ivy’s speech is vaguely affecting because it’s the capstone of her characters’ journey, but the rest of what happens feels like a valiant struggle to make an inherently dramatic event as undramatic as possible. These characters have worked and strived for this fucking award, but that doesn’t seem to matter. It all boils down to whether or not Derek is going to have his redemptive moment and the umpteenth portrayal of the Karen/Ivy feud that got old over a year ago.
It all ends with Karen and Ivy performing the “last number” of the awards, which is a song that Tom and Julia wrote that turns out to be all about Smash. I’m not even kidding. The lyrics, in and of themselves, wouldn’t be so bad if the show didn’t have the two of them singing in front of a giant series of red letters reading SMASH. I have no earthly idea if the producers of the show knew things were about to be over when they made this, but it sure seems like they did. It’s appropriate, however, that it all ends like this, with all of the characters frozen in a musical montage that reminds us how little we care about any of them and everybody in the audience pausing their DVRs to say, “Wait… what?!”