Smash’s first season ended on some high notes, as well as some low ones, which is kind of fitting, since Season 1 as a whole had some high notes, including the face-off between Ivy and Karen, among others, and low notes, including the whole Julia and her affair plotline and the twisted love triangle she that came about. Overall, the show was good enough for NBC to bring it back for Season 2, but needless to say, some changes will be woven into the overall thread of the series.
If you haven’t been keeping tabs, NBC has hired a new showrunner to churn out Season 2 of Smash. The new guy is Joshua Safran, who also has producing credits on The CW’s Gossip Girl. Luckily for fans, the man doesn’t seem to want to be mysterious about the changes we’ll see in Season 2. He recently spoke with EW, to explain that the show will be toning down its fantastical scenes quite a bit.
“There’s no bowling alley sing-alongs. There are fantasy sequences, but so far not on the level of the Bollywood cover.”
Even though some plots, settings, attitudes, and costumes may be shifting around in Season 2, Safran wants invested audiences to understand Smash’s new episodes won’t be creating an entirely different show. Instead, it seems like he just wants it to finesse it a bit.
“As a viewer, I really loved the show. It’s literally just reaching in and moving the tiny pieces that weren’t connecting, the gears that weren’t fully aligned. But it’s small shifts. If you loved Smash last year, you are not seeing a radically different show.”
We’ll have to wait and see exactly what the man means by “small shifts” and whether these changes will help the drama or hurt it. The good news is, there isn’t much longer to wait. Smash returns to NBC’s schedule with an extended episode on Tuesday, February 5 that will air in a special 9 p.m. ET timeslot. Following the premiere, the show will return to a 10 p.m. ET timeslot on February 12.
