Smash

New season, more promise. Good start. But seriously? Fewer plot-lines would be even better.

In total, the changes have led to a show that is much better, and is on much more solid footing, than it once was.

A partially successful reboot, with less music, more story.

The inevitable and believable intersection of "old" and "new" musical theater adds real life and renewed potential to Smash.

Like the Marilyn Monroe musical it's trying to mount, the drama treads familiar ground in a quirky, high-stepping way that you can't resist watching.

If what you want from Smash is what the pilot promised--a consistent, network-TV equivalent of mainstream Broadway--season 2 takes the first steps toward being that. The story feels better focused and, with help now from new cast member Jennifer Hudson, the show’s musical moments can deliver the passion and concentrated dream-power the scripts haven’t.

Smash introduces its winsome ingénue Karen (Katharine McPhee) to a headstrong young songwriter with hip Rent ambitions (rising star Jeremy Jordan, who headlined two real Broadway musicals last year). This subplot, like much of Smash, is cheesy and corny, but works when the impassioned singing starts. Which, for a musical drama about musicals, is what matters most.

Judging by three episodes sent for review, the[se] course corrections work.

Maybe this will all become coherent. But then maybe it shouldn't. Sometimes messy is better.

Until, and unless, all the elements fall into place, it's more smush than smash. [18 Feb 2013, p.41]

While it's easy to forget the show's shortcomings whenever McPhee or Hilty belt out one of Bombshell's stellar original songs or Jimmy croons a heartfelt power ballad, that's ultimately not enough to absolve the series from failing to let its most tenable narrative take center stage.

It is less accidentally ridiculous, and more knowingly, willfully campy, less pretentious, but also, for better and worse, less likely to include a Bollywood dance number.

NBC's Smash returns for its second season Tuesday still a work in progress. But at least there is progress.

New show runner Joshua Safran has, in any case, declared himself a fan of the show, promising changes more surgical than wholesale, a promise disappointing in its way. Nevertheless, he has trimmed much deadwood.

Much of the insanity that drove viewers to “hate-watch” the show in its first season has been scrubbed. Competence reigns. The results are mixed.

The problem is that the story in between the songs is still inconsistent and muddled.

It's oddly disconnected from the idea of art as transformation, the show's characters are thinly drawn and it's usually fairly easy to see where the story is heading.

Even with all the changes in front of and behind the camera, Smash is fundamentally the same show with the same problems.

The addition of Chicago native Hudson is a masterstroke, but with all that other melodrama, Smash remains a hit-or-miss proposition for me.

The musical numbers are competently staged, even if they often play like filler to underscore character montages. The plots mosey between drama and comedy and never hit their marks.

There are not many signs that the show is taking a turn toward anything better--more realism, more audacity, less sentimentality.