CAUGHT IN THE LOOP:
In discussions of Smash,
it’s pretty much inevitable that Glee
gets brought up, as they share a couple of crucial strands of DNA (musical
shows are uncommon enough), and both have derailed (in very different ways)
after promising beginnings into hot messes. However, there’s one thing that the shows share in common,
but led to different results—both developed their first seasons in a
bubble. Because of how Glee was produced, the first 13 episodes
were all basically locked and loaded before anything but the pilot aired. Likewise, because Smash debuted at midseason, it was largely produced and written
before the series began airing.
However, the results were completely different, and I want to talk a little bit about the bubble and its effects after the break (warning--long. Not Robert Caro-long, but long by blog standards.)
On Glee, I think
there’s a general consensus that those first 13 episodes are the high-water
mark for the show quality-wise, with a good mixture of contemporary pop and older
Broadway material (partially because music rights weren’t easy to come by), decent
service to all the characters (remember when Will Scheuster wasn’t completely
hateable and actually had a plot purpose other than writing something on the
whiteboard each week? Or when
Quinn was written with at least some iota of continuity?), and New Directions
actually being kind of scrappy underdogs.
However, when the show returned, it began responding to the loudest sets
of the fanbase, pushing shipper stuff (especially Rachel/Finn and Santana/Brittany) to the
forefront, amping up the amount of Kidz Bop-esque Top 40, bloating the cast to
ridiculous proportions and basically ignoring several characters (Tina?), and
subjecting us to theme episodes (with the Rocky
Horror one being the worst of those).
While, given Ryan Murphy’s track record, one could argue that this sort of derailment would
have happened regardless of whether it was in a bubble or not, I can’t help but
think leaving the bubble hurt the show, as many of the changes (especially the
almost obsessive focus on Finn/Rachel as some sort of ideal relationship) seem
pretty clearly driven by responses to the fanbase.
Smash, on the
other hand, went in the other direction—because the first season of the show
was developed in a bubble, they haven’t been able to respond to the backlash to
the show and what they’ve tried to force down our throats. Clearly, the show wants us all to be
Team Karen, rooting for the talented Iowan, and believes we're already in that camp. However, basically every viewer I’ve talked to is resolutely
on Team Ivy in this dispute, not merely because Hilty looks like Marilyn, but
because Hilty sings McPhee under the table consistently.
Similarly, clearly viewers/critics and
the creative team in the bubble differed wildly on the interest generated by Julia’s marriage,
Karen’s boyfriend troubles, Ellis’ bitchy assistant-ness, and Eileen’s creepy
relationship with a bartender (heck, pretty much every plot point on the show). Had
the show followed a more traditional production schedule, I have little doubt
that we would have seen narrative tweaks in response to the audience's reaction (Julia’s family getting sent off to
Mandyville, a different Karen/Ivy dynamic, much less Karen/Dev drama)—indeed, I
have no doubt we’re going to see some of those tweaks implemented in Season 2.
Because of the music/staging issues in both of the shows,
they, by their nature, are going to need more lead time than a more traditional
show, making it harder to course correct.
That said, shows with problems find a way to course correct all the
time—New Girl took the first half of
its season before finding the right balance between crazy Jess and quirky Jess,
NCIS: LA turned from a dourish buddy
cop show into a quipfest during season 2 (with the dropping of Peter Cambor and
the hiring of Renee Felice Smith and Eric Christian Olsen), and Cougar Town figured out what it was in
the middle of the first season. Of
course, sometimes the opposite happens, with a show derailing the way Glee has because of becoming a vehicle
for fanwanking—Castle certainly risks
that with the episodes of Beckett we
periodically get and how we ended the season.
Dan Harmon has talked about how it was weird to be making
the back half of this season of Community
without the feedback loop, particularly since the feedback loop has been
instrumental in shaping the show—giving us Troy and Abed and Annie and Jeff as
(b)romantic pairings, even if they weren’t envisioned as such when the show
began. Other shows will address it directly or indirectly as well--the Gossip Girl writers have basically
admitted that they monitor the Vulture recaps of the show and incorporate those
responses into later storylines.
That said, the absence of the feedback loop can work well
too. Mike Schur has talked about the strangeness of making much of the third
season of Parks and Rec not knowing
when it would air and how people would react to some of the substantial changes
that they’d made, and I’m not sure how it would have worked had the feedback
loop been ongoing. HBO in
particular has locked down series’ first seasons well before they begin airing,
and ABC has had a bunch of shows this year that were finished before they
started airing to various degrees of effectiveness (The River, Scandal, GCB).
However, it seems like neither completely ignoring the feedback loop nor
following its whims like a leaf on the wind works. Hopefully, Smash
finds its way to being more than a hot mess next season, and Glee takes the opportunity to reboot to
refind the voice that made it so fresh three years ago (a long hiatus, which
seems possible given that Fox has picked up 3.5 hours of new pilots this
afternoon with only one obvious hole in the schedule—replacing House), but I’m not optimistic that they're going to find their way.
