From the start, Smash has been an exercise in reducing expectations. The pilot was good, but it wasn’t as good as it probably should have been. The entirety of the first season slowly sank to the bottom of the ocean, and then the second season has mostly been a series of very curious story decisions. But I don’t know that the show ever dipped out of the C range. It had competent actors. It had enjoyable musical numbers much of the time. In the first season, at least, it had an unabashed willingness to go for just about anything, even if that “anything” was sometimes downright awful. Every so often, the show will do an inside-Broadway type of storyline, and these are usually reasonably compelling. In short, Smash is a disappointment, but I’d hesitate to label it one of the worst shows on television. There are far worse catastrophes out there. I can still watch this and be reasonably entertained.
Well, that was the case until now. “The Phenomenon” is such a bafflingly miscalculated piece of television that I’m hard-pressed to figure out exactly why anyone thought it would work. And yet as you watch it, it’s obvious that everybody involved thinks this is going to be some truly powerful stuff that will leave viewers weeping and Emmy voters filling out their ballots with Smash written down from top to bottom. “The Phenomenon” is so bad that I urge all of you to rush out, to find it on Hulu, to watch it right now, because it must be experienced. In fact, I paused it 10 minutes in on my screener to ask my wife to come watch it with me, because I needed to see it with her. It really needs to be shared, like a beloved family heirloom or a viral infection. “The Phenomenon” is such a misstep that it sort of loops back around to being entertaining again. Everything about it actively offended me, but I also wanted to watch it all over again.
The center of the episode is the death of Kyle, but the episode doesn’t have the basic decency to actually make itself be about the death of Kyle. Instead, it keeps pulling other things in. Academy Award winner Anjelica Huston throws yet another drink in Michael Christofer’s face, because somebody somewhere thinks it’s funny if that’s her thing. (Remember: She does it in the opening credits.) Jimmy, predictably, makes everything all about himself, and I think we’re supposed to sympathize with him in the moment, maybe even go so far as to empathize with him. There are flashbacks to when Kyle was alive, and he talks about a bunch of cheesy, maudlin ways to make Amanda’s death in Hit List resonate, then the show proceeds to get within spitting distance of every single one of them in the later Kyle flashbacks. (It even has Jimmy sing a song about how much he misses Kyle that conveniently happens to be in Hit List.) Scott does some treacherous bullshit that didn’t strike me as all that treacherous. And so on and so on. Every time the episode seemed about to settle down and deal with Kyle’s death, it skirted off toward something else.
Put this another way: The episode opened with Jimmy singing Radiohead classic to himself as he walked to Karen’s apartment—and I mean this literally, as in there were two Jimmys, and one was singing, and one was walking, and what the fuck?!—and it was somehow one of the less clumsy things in the hour.
Now, in theory, I liked the fact that the episode devoted so much time to the death of Kyle. I generally appreciate it when TV shows take the deaths of their characters at least somewhat seriously, as opposed to making said deaths into plot points, but that also presupposes that the characters have been built up in any way over the course of the season. Now that he’s dead, it’s insultingly apparent that Kyle’s only role within the show was to die. I liked the kid better than Jimmy, sure, but that’s not exactly an accomplishment he should put on his CV. I like roadkill better than Jimmy. I like various communicable diseases better than Jimmy. I like Karen better than Jimmy. (Watching this episode mostly made me sad for how Jeremy Jordan has been stuck with this immovable lump of a character. He’s trying—you can tell!—but he’s stuck with this character who couldn’t be sympathetic if he was saving a bushel of kittens and babies from Adolf Hitler himself.) So now I’m watching the show trying to tell me that Kyle meant so much to these people, and it turns out he’s just another interchangeable cog in the show’s great soap opera machine. What did we know about him, really? He cared about Jimmy? He wasn’t very good at writing the show’s book until he abruptly was? He had a really strange relationship with Tom?
So instead of actually being an episode about the hole Kyle’s death would leave in these characters’ lives or even just an episode about how they all tried to cope with the loss (and inevitably made things all about themselves), we instead got an episode about how Kyle’s death brought Jimmy and Karen back together, then made it cool to move Hit List to Broadway, thus reigniting the Tony feud between the two shows. For real? This is what we’re going with? It’d be one thing if I thought the show had a little bit of distance from how Jimmy and Karen take the opportunity of Kyle’s death to make everything all about them, but it just doesn’t. That scene where Jimmy talks about how the death is all his fault while overlooking the river? I think that’s supposed to be serious. There’s an attempt to say something profound about death here. Instead, it’s washed away in the face of more soap opera bullshit. (Weirdly, the only character whose being affected by Kyle’s death worked for me at all was Derek, which I wouldn’t have predicted.)
To make all of this even worse, the execution of the whole thing was stunningly inept. There was twinkly, sad piano music everywhere, to let us know how sad everybody was constantly. The flashbacks were thrown into the episode haphazardly and didn’t seem to have much bearing on the present day action at all. Tom sang a cover of Billy Joel’s “Vienna” that was really quite lovely, but it also went on and on forever, and it was all predicated on the idea that we’d been waiting for ages for Tom and Kyle to get together—since they were the only two gay men in the cast outside of Sam, I guess—even though the whole thing is more creepy than interesting, and… was anybody waiting for that? And, as mentioned, Jimmy literally sang “High And Dry” to another Jimmy. (At least if the ghost of Kyle had sung it, the show would have revealed itself as a sly meta-commentary on deaths in musicals, as it sometimes seemed to be trying to do. Instead, I don’t know. I got to hear a Radiohead song I liked?) Derek and Karen almost slept together, then didn’t, and it was still a huge fucking deal, even though nobody cares, and then Ivy something.
Also, Bernadette Peters had a musical number out of fucking nowhere. You do not waste your Bernadette Peters musical numbers, Smash!
I want to find something nice to say about this because I did keep watching it, even though I was hooting again and again at how bad it was. The cinematography was nice? I liked the way it captured that feeling of a rainy day when you know something is about to happen? The final scene—with the marquee lights dimming in Kyle’s memory—captured a legendary Broadway tradition for the wider audience? But I just can’t. For the most part, this was a tawdry, terrible episode that took what should have been a huge moment and reduced it to a bunch of typical TV bullshit. It made me laugh in derision as I was watching it, then made me sort of angry as I started to think about it afterward.