Let Me Be Your Star Read Free Page B

disconnected, hyperconnected,
insert-your-own-meaningless-Thomas-Friedman-byword-here age. It began in the
early wilds of the Internet with seminal sites like the original Television
Without Pity, whose gifted, pop-culture-obsessed stable of writers turned out,
sometimes over a period of several days, erudite mini-dissertations on the
latest episodes of a handful of buzzed-about shows. Now, when the virtual water
cooler has by and large replaced the physical one for the vast majority of
America’s underemployed creative class, there’s hardly an entertainment or pop
cultural website from The New York Times down that doesn’t offer
some sort of insta-summary of the shows that aired the night before. The endeavor
presents an interesting meta-literary challenge. How to write a compelling
narrative about another narrative, and for an audience divided among itself:
the people so obsessed with a given episode they want to spend the next six
hours reading about it on the Internet vs. the people who couldn’t be bothered
to watch but want to know the salient plot points; the commenters with minute
knowledge of every detail of a character vs. the ones whose idea of
contributing to the conversation is to petulantly wonder “why should we care
about any of these people.” Faced with such divergent needs and expectations,
an individual recapper can choose (although maybe that’s not the best word; at
that time of night, and on that kind of deadline, “choice” has about as much
relevance to the words you’re banging into your computer as it does to the
reproductive policy platform of the current Republican Party) to go a few
different ways. She can stick to a basic reiteration of plot points, peppered
with a few clever jokes or editorial asides. She can choose a single thematic
thread for intense, scholarly critique, or she can bypass analysis altogether
by means of a witty listicle or a series of gifs of Steve Buscemi cavorting
with a harem of scantily clad prostitutes or Don Draper getting slapped by a
prostitute or Tyrion Lannister sliding drunkenly off a chair and directly onto
the oiled crotch of yet another prostitute.
    Or she can slide deep into the depths of her subconscious
and dredge up anything she might find there, no matter how absurdist or
tangential. It’s a risky proposition: you might produce a series of by turn
fanciful and lacerating essays on art, love, and life itself, or you might wind
up a big pile of absurdist, tangential bullshit.
    I’ll leave it up to you where mine wound up.
    “They’re good,” my staff editor said of my first Smash efforts. NBC had sent screeners for the first four episodes, so I was able to
write the recaps in advance: Each one took three days to write and was about 4,000
words long. “But there’s a point where these things just become unreadable, you
know what I mean?” That point, it was suggested to me, was at about 2,500 words
of absurdist, tangential you-know-what.
    Other than this gentle suggestion, editorial input — particularly
in the first season, before some routine staffing turnover resolved itself — was
relatively minor. For better or worse, I was left to solve the peculiar
problems of recapping this increasingly peculiar television program pretty much
on my own.
    The initial premise of Smash was simple enough; it
was a fairly standard backstage drama revolving around the creation of a Broadway
musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Its cast of character included
Debra Messing and theater veteran Christian Borle as the writing team; Jack
Davenport as the womanizing, Fosse-esque director/choreographer; Anjelica
Huston as the ex-husband-haunted, drink-tossing, tough-as-nails producer
desperate to prove she could score a big hit on her own. Megan Hilty, a
peroxide blonde powerhouse who was unfamiliar to most of America, played Ivy
Lynn, a chorus girl also-ran mysteriously unable to break out of the ensemble
despite being a) incredibly talented and b) the