On Saturday, NBC aired Smash’s Season 2 and series finale in a two-hour epic weekend event. The show scored low ratings throughout its second season, but if the ratings had been different and the cancellation had not happened, executive producer Joshua Safran had big plans for Season 3. If you haven’t caught the finale, yet, there are a few spoilers in the following paragraphs, so quit reading right now.
Smash’s Season 2 finale gave plenty of Tony Awards to the top members of the cast, including Tom and Julia, as well as Derek. Unfortunately, Karen lost out and didn’t win in her category. Safran recently spoke out to EW to explain a deleted scene that would have given fans a hint at where Season 3 was going, had the show not already been cancelled. In the scene, an agent would have walked up to Karen as she sat at her table and told her she was movie star fodder.
“The plan for season 3 in my mind was a Hollywood movie musical. It would shoot in New York. I felt like after two seasons of watching two shows full trajectories, I didn’t want to repeat the story again so I thought I would take the season off and do a movie musical still using Broadway actors, still using Broadway stages, maybe it would have even been set in the world of Broadway. Who knows because we didn’t even get that far but it would have given audiences a season to [see] a different way of musicals being put together and then you could come back to Broadway in season 4. You see the seeds that are in the finale.”
It’s certainly a novel idea to put the musical-oriented drama into a behind-the-scenes movie setting, but Smash’s problem was never that it lacked novel ideas. While we won’t be getting six seasons and a movie for the series, Smash fans should at least be pleased that the show was able to wrap up its storylines in Season 2 and end on a decently high note. Safran may not have known he was working on a series finale when the last episode was shot, but it still wrapped up the characters storylines in a way that seemed final...and hopeful.
